High-performance bending and buckling analyses of cylindrical shells resting on elastic foundation using isogeometric scaled boundary finite element method

Abstract

A novel simulation approach based on the isogeometric analysis (IGA) and scaled boundary finite element method (SBFEM) is proposed in this paper for bending and buckling analyses of cylindrical shells resting on elastic foundation. The proposed formulation is derived from the 3D theory of elasticity. By using the cylinder axis as the scaling center, the cylindrical shell is reduced into 2D plane. The Non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) used in the Computer-aided Design (CAD) model are employed as the basis functions to describe the geometry and approximate the unknown fields in an isoparametric fashion. The present technique offers several major advantages over many other numerical methods, namely: only the in-plane dimension of the degenerative 2D plane required to be discretized into IGA elements, this effectively reduces the number of degrees of freedom (DOFs) and cuts down the computational costs; The physical fields along the thickness direction are described analytically, consequently the shear locking phenomena can be eliminated naturally without any special treatment; Due to the higher-order continuity and the locally supported properties of the NURBS, the present model can exactly represent arbitrary complex geometries at any level, which leads to superior accuracy and robustness; The intrinsic flexibility of the NURBS elements dramatically contributes to the excellent adaptability of the present approach on irregular meshes. Several numerical examples are carried out to evaluate the high performance of the present IGSBFEM on accuracy, efficiency and applicability.