Simple and Accurate Eight-Node and Six-Node Solid-Shell Elements with Explicit Element Stiffness Matrix Based on Quasi-Conforming Element Technique

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Based on the quasi-conforming (QC) element technique, accurate and reliable eight-node and six-node solid-shell elements are presented in this paper. These QC solid-shell elements can alleviate shear and Poisson thickness locking by appropriately interpolating the strain fields over the element domain, and they are completely free from hourglass modes by ensuring the rank sufficiency of the element stiffness matrix a priori. Furthermore, the element stiffness matrices of the present elements are evaluated explicitly rather than resorting to the numerical integration, which leads to a high computational efficiency. The QC solid-shell elements with the properly interpolated element strain fields can rigorously pass both membrane and bending patch tests. The popular benchmark problems are used to evaluate the performance of the QC solid-shell elements. The numerical results show that the present QC solid-shell elements yield not only accurate displacements but also good stress results for all the stress components. Particularly, the present QC solid-shell elements are capable of giving quite accurate results even with very coarse mesh.