A new family of elements for h-type adaptive analysis for shell problems

Abstract

In this paper, a new family of degenerated shell elements being suitable for h-type adaptive analysis is presented. For most of shell structures, the stiffness matrix of the shell element can be split into membrane, bending and shear stiffness matrices. For the membrane part, the membrane stresses are independently assumed and the pertinent stiffness matrix is obtained by the hybrid element method to improve the accuracy of membrane stresses. For the bending part, displacement-based strain is kept intact and used to formulate the corresponding stiffness matrix. For the shear part, the assumed natural strain method is employed to construct the shear strains to obtain pertinent stiffness matrix and overcome shear locking for thin shell problems. Several numerical examples are presented. With the newly developed element family, more regular meshes are generated and the convergence rate is higher than those yielded by using other element families.