• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.6 no.8
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• pp.921-937
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• 1998

A new four-node degenerated shell element with drilling degrees of freedom (DOF) is proposed. Allman-type displacement approximation is incorporated into the formulation of degenerated shell elements. The approximation improves in-plane performance and eliminates singularities of system matrices resulted from DOF deficiency. Transverse shear locking is circumvented by introducing assumed covariant shear strains. Two kinds of penalty energy are considered in the formulation for the purpose of suppressing spurious modes and representing true drilling rotations. The proposed element can be applied to almost all kinds of shell problems including composite laminated shell structures and folded shell structures. Numerical examples show that the element is of good accuracy and of reasonably fast convergence rate.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 2002.10a
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• pp.169-176
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• 2002

This paper is concerned with development of an enhanced quadratic Mindlin plate bending element. The behavior of the proposed plate element is further improved by the coupled use of non-conforming displacement modes, the selectively reduced integration scheme, and the assumed shear strain fields. The improvement may be attributable to the fact that the merits of these improvement techniques are merged in the formation of the new element in a complementary manner. The proposed quadratic finite element passes the patch tests, does not show spurious mechanism, and does not produce shear locking phenomena even with distorted meshes. It is shown that the element produces reliable solutions through numerical tests for standard benchmark problems. It is also noted that the element is applicable to transient dynamic analysis of Mindlin plates.

• Smart Structures and Systems
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.729-737
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• 2017

Piezoelectric composite laminates are a powerful material system that offers vast options to improve structural behavior. Successful design of piezoelectric adaptive structures and testing of control laws call for highly accurate, reliable and numerically efficient numerical tools. This paper puts focus onto linear and geometrically nonlinear static and dynamic analysis of smart structures made of such a material system. For this purpose, highly efficient linear 3-node and 4-node finite shell elements are proposed. Both elements employ the Mindlin-Reissner kinematics. The shear locking effect is treated by the discrete shear gap (DSG) technique with the 3-node element and by the assumed natural strain (ANS) approach with the 4-node element. Geometrically nonlinear effects are considered using the co-rotational approach. Static and dynamic examples involving actuator and sensor function of piezoelectric layers are considered.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.26 no.4
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• pp.255-262
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• 2013

In this paper, a shape design sensitivity analysis(DSA) method is presented for Mindlin plates using an isogeometric approach. The isogeometric method possesses desirable advantages; the representation of exact geometry and the higher order inter-element continuity, which lead to the fast convergence of solution as well as accurate sensitivity results. Unlike the finite element methods using linear shape functions, the isogeometric method considers the exact normal vector and curvature of the CAD geometry, taking advantages of higher order NURBS basis functions. A selective reduced integration(SRI) technique is incorporated to overcome the difficulty of 'shear locking' phenomenon. This simple technique is surprisingly helpful for the accuracy of the isogeometric shape sensitivity without complicated formulation. Through the numerical examples of plate bending problems, the accuracy of the proposed isogeometric analysis method is compared with that of finite element one. Also, the isogeometric shape sensitivity turns out to be very accurate when compared with finite difference sensitivity.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.1
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• pp.83-114
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• 2003

A new simple 3-node triangular flat-shell element with standard nodal DOF (6 DOF per node) is proposed for the linear and geometrically nonlinear analysis of very thin to thick plate and shell structures. The formulation of element GT9 (Long and Xu 1994), a generalized conforming membrane element with rigid rotational freedoms, is employed as the membrane component of the new shell element. Both one-point reduced integration scheme and a corresponding stabilization matrix are adopted for avoiding membrane locking and hourglass phenomenon. The bending component of the new element comes from a new generalized conforming Kirchhoff-Mindlin plate element TSL-T9, which is derived in this paper based on semiLoof constrains and rational shear interpolation. Thus the convergence can be guaranteed and no shear locking will happen. Furthermore, a simple hybrid procedure is suggested to improve the stress solutions, and the Updated Lagrangian formulae are also established for the geometrically nonlinear problems. Numerical results with solutions, which are solved by some other recent element models and the models in the commercial finite element software ABAQUS, are presented. They show that the proposed element, denoted as GMST18, exhibits excellent and better performance for the analysis of thin-think plates and shells in both linear and geometrically nonlinear problems.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.14 no.4
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• pp.481-494
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• 2001

An enhanced degenerated shell finite element (FE), which has been developed for inelastic analysis of reinforced concrete structures is described in this paper. Generally, Reissner-Mindlin (RM) assumptions are adopted to develop the degenerated shell FE so that transverse shear deformation effects is considered. However, it is found that there are serious defects such as locking phenomena in RM degenerated shell FE since the stiffness matrix has been overestimated in some situations. As remedies of locking phenomena, reduced integration, incompatible mode and assumed strain method have been used. Especially, the assumed strain method has been successfully used in many FEs. But contrarily, there is a few investigation on the performance of the assumed strains in the inelastic analysis of concrete structures. Therefore, shell formulation is provided in this paper with emphasis on the terms related to the stiffness matrix based on assumed strain method and microscopic concrete material model. Finally, the performance of the present shell element is tested and demonstrated with several numerical examples. From the numerical tests, the present result shows a good agreement with experimental data or other numerical results.

• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
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• v.13 no.2
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• pp.209-220
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• 2000

For non-linear analysis of stiffened shell structures, the total Lagrangian formulation is presented based upon the degenerated shell element. Geometrically correct formulation is developed by updating the direction of normal vectors and taking into account second order rotational terms in the incremental displacement field. Assumed strain concept is adopted in order to overcome shear locking phenomena and to eliminate spurious zero energy mode. The post-buckling behaviors of stiffened shell structures are traced by modeling the stiffener as a shell element and considering general transformation between the main structure and the stiffener at the connection node. Numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed shell element are presented and compared with references' results.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.807-829
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• 2004

The Element-Based Lagrangian Formulation of a 9-node resultant-stress shell element is presented for the isotropic and anisotropic composite material. The effect of the coupling term between the bending strain and displacement has been investigated in the warping problem. The strains, stresses and constitutive equations based on the natural co-ordinate have been used throughout the Element-Based Lagrangian Formulation of the present shell element which offers an advantage of easy implementation compared with the traditional Lagrangian Formulation. The element is free of both membrane and shear locking behavior by using the assumed natural strain method such that the element performs very well in thin shell problems. In composite plates and shells, the transverse shear stiffness is defined by an equilibrium approach instead of using the shear correction factor. The arc-length control method is used to trace complex equilibrium paths in thin shell applications. Several numerical analyses are presented and discussed in order to investigate the capabilities of the present shell element. The results showed very good agreement compared with well-established formulations in the literature.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.17 no.7 s.94
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• pp.1719-1730
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• 1993

This paper presents the theoretical natural frequencies of out-of-plane deformable ring based on the variables such as out-of-plane deflection, torsional rotation and shear rotation. Based on the same variables, a finite element eigen analysis is carried out by using the $C^0$-continuous, isoparametric element which has three nodes per element and three degrees-of-freedom at each node. Numerical experiments are peformed to find the integration scheme which produces accurate natural frequencies, natural modes and correct rigid body motion. The uniformly reduced integration and the selective reduced integration give more accurate numerical frequencies than the uniformly full integration, but the uniformly reduced integration produces incorrect rigid body motion while selective reduced integration does correct one. Therefore, the ring element based on the three variables which employes selective reduced integration is recommended to avoid spurious modes, to alleviate the error due to shear locking and to produce correct rigid body motion, simultaneously.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.41-61
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• 1998

A state-of-the-art report on the new finite elements formulated by the addition of nonconforming displacement modes has been presented. The development of a series improved nonconforming finite elements for the analysis of plate and shell structures is described in the first part of this paper. These new plate and shell finite elements are established by the combined use of different improvement schemes such as; the addition of nonconforming modes, the reduced (or selective) integration, and the construction of the substitute shear strain fields. The improvement achieved may be attributable to the fact that the merits of these improvement techniques are merged into the formation of the new elements in a complementary manner. It is shown that the results obtained by the new elements give significantly improved solutions without any serious defects such as; the shear locking, spurious zero energy mode for the linear as well as nonlinear benchmark problems. Recent developments in the transition elements that have a variable number of mid-side nodes and can be effectively used in the adaptive mesh refinement are presented in the second part. Finally, the nonconforming transition flat shell elements with drilling degrees of freedom are also presented.