A field-consistency approach to plate elements

The design of robust plate and shell elements has been a very challenging area for several decades. The main difficulty has been the shear locking phenomenon in plate elements and the shear and membrane locking phenomena together in the shell elements. Among the various artifices or devices which are used to develop elements free of these problems is the field-consistency approach. In this paper this approach is reviewed, It turns out that not only Mindlin type elements but also elements based on higher-order theories could be developed using the technique.