Refine
Document Type
- Conference Proceeding (2) (remove)
A four-node quadrilateral shell element with smoothed membrane-bending based on Mindlin-Reissner theory is proposed. The element is a combination of a plate bending and membrane element. It is based on mixed interpolation where the bending and membrane stiffness matrices are calculated on the boundaries of the smoothing cells while the shear terms are approximated by independent interpolation functions in natural coordinates. The proposed element is robust, computationally inexpensive and free of locking. Since the integration is done on the element boundaries for the bending and membrane terms, the element is more accurate than the MITC4 element for distorted meshes. This will be demonstrated for several numerical examples.
Isogeometric finite element analysis has become a powerful alternative to standard finite elements due to their flexibility in handling complex geometries. One major drawback of NURBS based isogeometric finite elements is their less effectiveness of local refinement. In this study, we present an alternative to NURBS based isogeometric finite elements that allow for local refinement. The idea is based on polynomial splines and exploits the flexibility of T-meshes for local refinement. The shape functions satisfy important properties such as non-negativity, local support and partition of unity. We will demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method by two numerical examples.