Evaluation of the strain energy density value without the construction of the control volume in the preprocessing phase of the finite element analysis

This work investigates the error in the evaluation of the Strain Energy Density value when it is evaluated without the construction of the control volume in the pre-processing phase of the finite element analysis. Several numerical simulations were carried out to evaluate this value both according to the conventional procedure of the Strain Energy Density method, that requires the construction of the control volume in the pre-processing phase of the FEM analysis, and according to the procedure shown in this work that can be applied directly in the post-processing phase without requiring particular devices in the pre-processing phase of the numerical analysis. The main advantage of this new procedure is that, accepting an error that depends on the refinement of the mesh, it is possible to apply this method also to those numerical simulations already done for other purposes. This allows also to decrease considerably the effort of the researcher and the calculation time.