The MIN-N family of pure-displacement, triangular, Mindlin plate elements

In recent years the pure displacement formulation for plate elements has not been as popular as other formulations. We revisit the pure displacement formulation for shear-deformable plate elements and propose a family of N-node, displacement-compatible, fully-integrated, pure-displacement, triangular, Mindlin plate elements, MIN-N. The development has been motivated by the relative simplicity of the pure displacement formulation and by the success of the existing 3-node plate element, MIN3. The formulation of MIN3 is generalized to obtain the MIN-N family, which possesses complete, fully compatible kinematic fields, in which the interpolation functions for transverse displacement are one degree higher than those for rotations. General element-level formulas for the thin-limit Kirchhoff constraints are developed. The 6-node, 18 degree-of-freedom element MIN6, with cubic displacement and quadratic rotations, is implemented and tested extensively. Numerical results show that MIN6 exhibits good performance for both static and dynamic analyses in the linear, elastic regime. The results illustrate that the fully-integrated MIN6 element has excellent performance in the thin limit, even for coarse meshes, and that it does not require shear relaxation.