Three-dimensional nonlinear stress analysis of functionally graded shells subjected to displacement-dependent loads

Abstract

The nonlinear geometrically exact (GeX) hybrid-mixed four-node solid-shell element under non-conservative loading, developed in the companion paper, is here extended to the stress analysis of functionally graded material (FGM) shells. The term GeX means that the middle surface is described by analytical functions, including spline functions, and, therefore, the coefficients of the first and second fundamental forms can be taken exactly at element nodes. The FGM solid-shell element formulation is based on the choice of N sampling surfaces (SaS) parallel to the middle surface and located at Chebyshev polynomial nodes within the shell as well as on the outer surfaces, to introduce the displacements of these surfaces as basic unknowns. The use of Lagrange polynomials of degree N–1 in the distributions of displacements, strains, stresses, and elastic coefficients through the thickness of the shell leads to an efficient 3N-parameter shell formulation. To develop the FGM four-node solid-shell element based on the hybrid-mixed method, in which strains and stresses are utilized as primary variables, the Hu-Washizu variational principle is applied. Due to the analytical integration used to evaluate the tangent stiffness matrix, the developed FGM solid-shell element subjected to displacement-dependent loads shows superior performance in the case of coarse meshes and allows the use of only one load step in most of the considered benchmark problems. It has been established that the difference between the second Piola-Kirchhoff and Cauchy stress tensors in non-conservative problems for FGM shells undergoing moderately large strains can be significant.