• Computational Structural Engineering
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• v.1 no.2
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• pp.83-90
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• 1988

The present work is concerned with the improvement of finite element for the analysis of plate bending structures. The element formulation is based upon Mindlin plate concept. The displacement field of this element is formed by adding nonconforming modes to two rotational displacement components of a 'heterosis plate element. The element has the requisite numbers of zero eigenvalues associated with rigid body modes to avoid the spurious zero energy mode. It is shown that the results obtained by the element converged to the exact solutions very rapidly as the mesh is refined and exhibited reliable solutions through numerical studies for standard benchmark problems. This element is shown to overcome the shear locking problem completely in very thin plate situation even for irregular meshes.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.21 no.1
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• pp.37-55
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• 2016

In this study, the influence of centrally placed circular and square cutouts on vibration and buckling characteristics of different ply-oriented laminated panels under the action of compressive and/or tensile types of non-uniform in-plane edge loads are investigated. The panels are inspected under the action of uniaxial compression, uniaxial tension and biaxial, compression-tension, loading configurations. Furthermore, the effects of different degrees of edge restraints and panel aspect ratios are also addressed in this work. Towards this, a nine-node heterosis plate element has been adopted which includes the effect of shear deformation and rotary inertia. According to the results, the tensile buckling loads are higher than that of compressive buckling loads. However, the tensile buckling load continuously reduces with the increased cutout sizes irrespective of ply-orientations. This is also true for compressive buckling loads except for some particular ply-orientations with higher sized cutouts.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.427-446
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• 2022

Cutouts in the beams or plates are often unavoidable due to inspection, maintenance, ventilation, structural aesthetics purpose, and sometimes to lighten the structures. Therefore, there will be a substantial reduction in the strength of the structure due to the introduction of the cutouts. However, these cutouts can be reinforced with the different patterns of ribs (stiffener) to enhance the strength of the structure. The present study highlights the influence of the elliptical cutout reinforced with a different pattern of ribs on the stability performance of such stiffened composite panels subjected to non-uniform edge loads by employing the Finite element (FE) technique. In the present formulation, a 9-noded heterosis element is used to model the skin, and a 3-noded isoparametric beam element is used to simulate the rib that is attached around a cutout in different patterns. The displacement compatibility condition is employed between the plate and stiffener, and arbitrary orientations are taken care by introducing respective transformation matrices. The effect of shear deformation and rotary inertia are incorporated in the formulation. A new mesh configuration is developed to house the attached ribs around an elliptical cutout with different patterns. Initially, a study is performed on the panels with different stiffener schemes for various ply orientations and for different stiffener depth to width ratios (d_s/b_s) to determine an optimal stiffener configuration. Further, various parametric studies are conducted on an obtained optimal stiffened panel to understand the effect of cutout size, cutout orientation, panel aspect ratio, and boundary conditions. Finally, from the analysis, it can be observed that the arrangement of the stiffener attached to a panel has a major impact on the buckling capacity of the stiffened panel. The stiffener's depth to width ratio also significantly influences the buckling characteristic.

• Proceedings of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute Conference
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• 1995.04a
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• pp.17-27
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• 1995

For the post-buckling and elasto-plastic analysis of 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 in the iteration process and evaluating the total Green-Lagrange stain corresponding U total displacements. In the calculation of the stiffness matrix, the element formulation takes into account the effect of finite rotation increments by retaining second order rotation terms in the incremental displacement field. The selective or reduced integration scheme using the heterosis element is applied in order to overcome both shear locking phenomena and the zero energy mode. The load/displacement incremental scheme is adopted for geometric non-linear F .E. analysis. Based on such methodology, the computer program is developed and numerical examples to demonstrate the accuracy and the effectiveness of the proposed shell element are presented and compared with references's results.