Development of triangular flat-shell element using a new thin-thick plate bending element

A new simple 3-node triangular flat-shell element with standard nodal DOF (6 DOF per node) is proposed for the linear and geometrically nonlinear analysis of very thin to thick plate and shell structures. The formulation of element GT9 (Long and Xu 1994), a generalized conforming membrane element with rigid rotational freedoms, is employed as the membrane component of the new shell<br />element. Both one-point reduced integration scheme and a corresponding stabilization matrix are adopted for avoiding membrane locking and hourglass phenomenon. The bending component of the new element comes from a new generalized conforming Kirchhoff-Mindlin plate element TSL-T9, which is derived in this paper based on semiLoof constrains and rational shear interpolation. Thus the convergence can be guaranteed and no shear locking will happen. Furthermore, a simple hybrid procedure is suggested to improve the stress solutions, and the Updated Lagrangian formulae are also established for the<br />geometrically nonlinear problems. Numerical results with solutions, which are solved by some other recent element models and the models in the commercial finite element software ABAQUS, are presented. They show that the proposed element, denoted as GMST18, exhibits excellent and better performance for the<br />analysis of thin-think plates and shells in both linear and geometrically nonlinear problems.