A note on locking in a shear flexible triangular plate bending element

Abstract

The use of reduced integration for alleviating the problem of locking in the development of a shear flexible 3-noded, 9-degrees-of-freedom plate element is investigated. A simple strip test is carried out using two assembled triangles to show that even with a reduced integration of the shear energy term, where only one numerical integration point is used at the centroid of each triangle, a locking term is introduced after assembly. Thus, in an assembly of such elements, locking is to be expected.