Quadrilateral Area Coordinate Systems, Part II — New Tools for Constructing Quadrilateral Elements

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the applications of the quadrilateral area coordinate systems discussed in the pre vious chapter. Here, a series of new quadrilateral elements formulated by the quadrilateral area coordinate methods are introduced in detail. Foll’ owing the Introduction in Sect. 17.1, the sensitivity analysis of the quadri lateral membrane elements to mesh distortion is discussed in Sect. 17.2. Then, a brief review of the construction of various quadrilateral elements formulated by the quadrilateral area coordinate methods is given in Sect. 17.3. In Sects. 17.4 to 17.7 of this chapter, various quadrilateral membrane elements (4-node element, 4-node element with drilling freedoms, 8-node element) for linear and nonlinear analyses, in which the are coordinate methods are adopted, are introduced in detail. And, in the last three sections (Sects. 17.8 to 17.10), the applications of the area coordinate methods for the quadrilateral thin plate, thick plate and composite laminated plate elements are descri bed, respectively. It is demonstrated that the area coordinate methods are efficient tools for developing simple, effective and reliabl e serendipity quadrilateral element models.