Determination of inter- and free-boundary stresses in plate analysis

Abstract

The conventional finite-element method shows its weakness in determining the stress distributions along free- and interboundaries for plate (facet shell) analysis. This is because the chosen element displacement and rotation functions do not implicitly satisfy the conditions that prevail at the boundaries. A procedure has been proposed to modify the conventional finite-element method so as to allow the elastic stresses along the free- and interboundaries of plates to be determined with improved accuracy. The results obtained by this modified method are compared with both an experimental and a traditional finite-element solution. The comparison shows that the modified solution is in better agreement with the experimental test data as compared with the traditional solution. The computation time required to perform the additional calculations for determining free- and interboundary stresses with improved accuracy is only a small fraction of that required for the complete finite-element analysis.