Truncated hierarchical B-splines in isogeometric analysis of thin shell structures

This paper presents an isogeometric discretization of Kirchhoff-Love thin shells using truncated hierarchical B-splines (THB-splines). It is demonstrated that the underlying basis functions are ideally appropriate for adaptive refinement of the so-called thin shell structures in the framework of isogeometric analysis. The proposed approach provides sufficient flexibility for refining basis functions independent of their order. The main advantage of local THB-spline evaluation is that it provides higher degree analysis on tight meshes of arbitrary geometry which makes it well suited for discretizing the Kirchhoff-Love shell formulation. Numerical results show the versatility and high accuracy of the present method. This study is a part of the efforts by the authors to bridge the gap between CAD and CAE.