Downwind and upwind approximations for mesh and model adaptivity of elasto‐plastic composites

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The use of heterogeneous materials, such as composites with Prandtl‐Reuss‐type material laws, has increased in industrial praxis, making finite element modeling with homogenization techniques a well‐accepted tool. These methods are particularly advantageous to account for microstructural mechanisms which can be related to nonlinearities and time‐dependency due to elasto‐plasticity behavior. However, their advantages are diminished by increasing computational demand. The present contribution deals with the balance of accuracy and numerical efficiency of nonlinear homogenization associated with a framework of goal‐oriented adaptivity, which takes into account error accumulation over time. To this end, model adaptivity of homogenization methods is coupled to mesh adaptivity on the macro scale. Our new proposed adaptive procedure is driven by a goal‐oriented a posteriori error estimator based on duality techniques using downwind and upwind approximations. Due to nonlinearities and time‐dependency of the plasticity, the estimation of error transport and error generation is obtained with a backward‐in‐time dual method despite a high demand on memory capacity. In this contribution, the dual problem is solved with a forward‐in‐time dual method that allows estimating the full error during the resolution of the primal problem without the need for extra memory capacity. Finally, a numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive approach.</jats:p>