Finite Element Analysis of Shell Structures

The finite element analysis of general shell structures is faced with the problems of shear and membrane locking. These problems are well known and much research has been focused on the development of powerful shell elements to eliminate these problems. This book employs three shell elements these are four nodes degenerated shell element, four nodes flat shell element and nine nodes degenerated shell element. Each one of these elements has six degrees of freedom per node. Additional elements have been developed to avoid problems; these are: four nodes element, employing the Mixed Interpolation of Tensorial Components approach, Non Conforming Element and nine nodes element with Selective Reduced Integration and Weighted Modified Integration. A new solution is proposed to correct the convergence curve to be asymptotic to the exact solution curve by using extrapolation. A geometric nonlinear formulation based on the total Lagrangian formulation using both engineering strains and Green’s strains was adopted. The formulations were implemented into a nonlinear finite element program and some subroutines are included. Good results are obtained when applying in different numerical examples