Comparison of finite element method based on nodal displacement and absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) in thin shell analysis

Abstract

Finite element method is a commonly used method in the simulation of plate and shell deformation. Usually, researchers in this field establish elements based on displacements of nodes and gradients of displacements with respect to a reference configuration as nodal variables. Recently, a new formulation, absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF), has been developed. In this formulation, the gradients of the global position vector are used as nodal coordinates and no rotations are interpolated over the finite element. In this paper, the application, efficiency and domain of the application of these two formulations have been studied by considering some numerical examples. These examples show that high nonlinearity and very large computation time and extra wrinkling in the predicted deformed shape of plate are some disadvantages of the ANCF models in comparison with the classical finite element method models. The major discussion is about the performance of ANCF shape functions for rectangular elements. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.