• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.8 no.2
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• pp.207-231
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• 1999

A versatile 4-node shell element which is useful for the analysis of arbitrary shell structures is presented. The element is developed by flat shell approach, i.e., by combining a membrane element with a Mindlin plate element. The proposed element has six degrees of freedom per node and permits an easy connection to other types of finite elements. In the plate bending part, an improved Mindlin plate has been established by the combined use of the addition of non-conforming displacement modes (N) and the substitute shear strain fields (S). In the membrane part, the nonconforming displacement modes are also added to the displacement fields to improve the behavior of membrane element with drilling degrees of freedom and the modified numerical integration (M) is used to overcome the membrane locking problem. Thus the element is designated as NMS-4F. The rigid link correction technique is adopted to consider the effect of out-of-plane warping. The shell element proposed herein passes the patch tests, does not show any spurious mechanism and does not produce shear and membrane locking phenomena. It is shown that the element produces reliable solutions even for the distorted meshes through the analysis of benchmark problems.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.363-377
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• 2018

An efficient and free of shear locking finite element model is developed and employed to study free vibration of tapered bidirectional functionally graded material (BFGM) beams. The beam material is assumed to be formed from four distinct constituent materials whose volume fraction continuously varies along the longitudinal and thickness directions by power-law functions. The finite element formulation based on the first-order shear deformation theory is derived by using hierarchical functions to interpolate the displacement field. In order to improve efficiency and accuracy of the formulation, the shear strain is constrained to constant and the exact variation of the cross-sectional profile is employed to compute the element stiffness and mass matrices. A comprehensive parametric study is carried out to highlight the influence of the material distribution, the taper and aspect ratios as well as the boundary conditions on the vibration characteristics. Numerical investigation reveals that the proposed model is efficient, and it is capable to evaluate the natural frequencies of BFGM beams by using a small number of the elements. It is also shown that the effect of the taper ratio on the fundamental frequency of the BFGM beams is significantly influenced by the boundary conditions. The present results are of benefit to optimum design of tapered FGM beam structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.41 no.2
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• pp.205-229
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• 2012

This paper presents a new nine-node Lagrangian quadrilateral plate bending element (MQP9) using the Integrated Force Method (IFM) for the analysis of thin and moderately thick plate bending problems. Three degrees of freedom: transverse displacement w and two rotations ${\theta}_x$ and ${\theta}_y$ are considered at each node of the element. The Mindlin-Reissner theory has been employed in the formulation which accounts the effect of shear deformation. Many standard plate bending benchmark problems have been analyzed using the new element MQP9 for various grid sizes via Integrated Force Method to estimate defections and bending moments. These results of the new element MQP9 are compared with those of similar displacement-based plate bending elements available in the literature. The results are also compared with exact solutions. It is observed that the presented new element MQP9 is free from shear locking and produced, in general, excellent results in all plate bending benchmark problems considered.

• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers
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• v.16 no.12
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• pp.2287-2297
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• 1992

The Formulation of a new Hermite straight beam element to eliminate the shear locking is presented. All the kinematic variables in Timoshenko beam are reinterpreted by the consideration of equilibrium equations together. It shows that when the modified transverse displacement field is used the Timoshenko beam looks apparently the same as the Euler beam. The element is formulated for the modified transverse displacement field to have the same interpolation scheme as that in the Hermite element. Transformation Matrix which relates a modified nodal vector with nonmodified one is also introduced to deal with general boundary conditions. Several examples are demonstrated and discussed for the purpose of verification of the concepts employed. The solutions obtained reveal that the element describes of the beam quite correctly, showing no locking and that it is also applicable to the analysis of both thin and thick beams.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.199-223
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• 2003

The formulation of a non-linear shear deformable shell element is presented for the solution of stability problems of stiffened plates and shells. The formulation of the geometrical stiffness presented here is exactly defined on the midsurface and is efficient for analyzing stability problems of thick plates and shells by incorporating bending moment and transverse shear resultant force. As a result of the explicit integration of the tangent stiffness matrix, this formulation is computationally very efficient in incremental nonlinear analysis. The element is free of both membrane and shear locking behaviour by using the assumed strain method such that the element performs very well in the thin shells. By using six degrees of freedom per node, the present element can model stiffened plate and shell structures. The formulation includes large displacement effects and elasto-plastic material behaviour. The material is assumed to be isotropic and elasto-plastic obeying Von Mises's yield condition and its associated flow rules. The results showed good agreement with references and computational efficiency.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.86 no.3
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• pp.291-309
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• 2023

This paper addresses the finite element modeling of functionally graded porous (FGP) beams for free vibration and buckling behaviour cases. The formulated finite element is based on simple and efficient higher order shear deformation theory. The key feature of this formulation is that it deals with Euler-Bernoulli beam theory with only three unknowns without requiring any shear correction factor. In fact, the presented two-noded beam element has three degrees of freedom per node, and the discrete model guarantees the interelement continuity by using both C⁰ and C¹ continuities for the displacement field and its first derivative shape functions, respectively. The weak form of the governing equations is obtained from the Hamilton principle of FGP beams to generate the elementary stiffness, geometric, and mass matrices. By deploying the isoparametric coordinate system, the derived elementary matrices are computed using the Gauss quadrature rule. To overcome the shear-locking phenomenon, the reduced integration technique is used for the shear strain energy. Furthermore, the effect of porosity distribution patterns on the free vibration and buckling behaviours of porous functionally graded beams in various parameters is investigated. The obtained results extend and improve those predicted previously by alternative existing theories, in which significant parameters such as material distribution, geometrical configuration, boundary conditions, and porosity distributions are considered and discussed in detailed numerical comparisons. Determining the impacts of these parameters on natural frequencies and critical buckling loads play an essential role in the manufacturing process of such materials and their related mechanical modeling in aerospace, nuclear, civil, and other structures.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.65 no.3
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• pp.213-222
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• 2018

The purpose of this paper is to study free vibration analysis of thick plates resting on Winkler foundation using Mindlin's theory with shear locking free fourth order finite element, to determine the effects of the thickness/span ratio, the aspect ratio, subgrade reaction modulus and the boundary conditions on the frequency paramerets of thick plates subjected to free vibration. In the analysis, finite element method is used for spatial integration. Finite element formulation of the equations of the thick plate theory is derived by using higher order displacement shape functions. A computer program using finite element method is coded in C++ to analyze the plates free, clamped or simply supported along all four edges. In the analysis, 17-noded finite element is used. Graphs are presented that should help engineers in the design of thick plates subjected to earthquake excitations. It is concluded that 17-noded finite element can be effectively used in the free vibration analysis of thick plates. It is also concluded that, in general, the changes in the thickness/span ratio are more effective on the maximum responses considered in this study than the changes in the aspect ratio.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.59 no.3
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• pp.503-526
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• 2016

In-plane and out-of-plane free vibration analysis of Timoshenko curved beams is addressed based on the isogeometric method, and an effective scheme to avoid numerical locking in both of the two patterns is proposed in this paper. The isogeometric computational model takes into account the effects of shear deformation, rotary inertia and axis extensibility of curved beams, and is applicable for uniform circular beams, and more complicated variable curvature and cross-section beams as illustrated by numerical examples. Meanwhile, it is shown that, the $C^{p-1}$-continuous NURBS elements remarkably have higher accuracy than the finite elements with the same number of degrees of freedom. Nevertheless, for in-plane or out-of-plane vibration analysis of Timoshenko curved beams, the NURBS-based isogeometric method also exhibits locking effect to some extent. To eliminate numerical locking, the selective reduced one-point integration and $\bar{B}$ projection element based on stiffness ratio is devised to achieve locking free analysis for in-plane and out-of-plane models, respectively. The suggested integral schemes for moderately slender models obtain accurate results in both dominated and non-dominated regions of locking effect. Moreover, this strategy is effective for beam structures with different slenderness. Finally, the influence factors of structural parameters of curved beams on their natural frequency are scrutinized.

• Structural Engineering and Mechanics
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• v.33 no.4
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• pp.485-502
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• 2009

A new 8-node serendipity quadrilateral plate bending element (MQP8) based on the Mindlin-Reissner theory for the analysis of thin and moderately thick plate bending problems using Integrated Force Method is presented in this paper. The performance of this new element (MQP8) is studied for accuracy and convergence by analyzing many standard benchmark plate bending problems. This new element MQP8 performs excellent in both thin and moderately thick plate bending situations. And also this element is free from spurious/zero energy modes and free from shear locking problem.

• 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.