Treatment of locking behaviour for displacement-based finite element analysis of composite beams

In the displacement based finite element analysis of composite beams that consist of two Euler-Bernoulli beams juxtaposed with a deformable shear connection, the coupling of the displacement fields may cause oscillations in the interlayer slip field and reduction in optimal convergence rate, known as sliplocking. In this study, the B-bar procedure is proposed to alleviate the locking effects. It is also shown that by changing the primary dependent variables in the mathematical model, to be able to interpolate the interlayer slip field directly, oscillations in the slip field can be completely eliminated. Examples are presented to illustrate the performance and the numerical characteristics of the proposed methods.