Three new triangular thick plate/shell elements based on absolute nodal coordinate formulation

Abstract

In this paper, three new triangular fully parameterized thick plate/shell elements are proposed based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation. The volume parameters and corresponding independent volume gradient vectors are used to simplify the element construction. The node-wise structural parameter is adopted to circumvent the slope discontinuity issue associated with the volume gradient vectors. Two three-node elements inherit the interpolation strategy in the membrane direction of a well verified thin plate element. For the thickness direction, linear and quadratic interpolation are used in the three-node elements. Inspired by the quadrilateral plate elements with gradient vectors only along thickness direction, a six-node triangular element is presented with quadratic interpolation in both membrane and thickness direction. Three static analyses with large deformation and one dynamic analysis are conducted to evaluate the performance of the new elements. It concludes that the three-node element with linear interpolation in the thickness direction performs not well due to the incompatible/low interpolation in the thickness direction. The other two elements show good accuracy in all the numerical tests. Though the six-node element exhibits slightly higher accuracy than the quadratic three-node element, its DOFs are much more than the quadratic three-node element, which makes it less attractive.