COMPUTATIONAL MECHANICS New Trends and Applications S. Idelsohn, E. O˜ nate and E. Dvorkin (Eds.) c CIMNE, Barcelona, Spain 1998 A TRANSIENT DOMAIN DECOMPOSITION METHOD FOR THE ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURAL DYNAMIC PROBLEMS Alexandre S. Hansen, Fernando A. Rochinha Mechanical Engineering Department EE-COPPE-UFRJ Cx. Postal 68503, CEP 21945-970, RIO DE JANEIRO-BRAZIL e-mail: hansen@com.ufrj.br, faro@com.ufrj.br Key words: Domain Decomposition, Dynamics, Inexact Uzawa, Parallel Processing Abstract. We propose and study, for structural dynamic problems, a domain decom- position method based on an augmented Lagrangian formulation. This method uses an inexact Uzawa algorithm to solve the linear system required at any time increment. The proposed algorithm is interesting, for parallel and vector applications, because it doesn’t need scalar products and has less operations by iteration than the conjugate gradient method applied to the dual problem. Three dimensional elasticity dinamic problems are solved by the proposed algorithm and some comparisons with the conjugate gradient method and Uzawa algorithm are addressed. 1