Strain recovery-based equilibrated transverse shear stresses in functionally graded shell-like structures

The standard numerical approximation of structural displacement field leads to the thickness-wise transverse shear stress distributions which are quite different from the exact ones. To overcome this inherent problem, an effective and reliable post-processing method is presented based on the strain recovery and the stress equilibrium, particularly for functionally graded cylindrical and conical elastic panels. The present method is developed in the framework of locking-free 2-D natural element method. Through the recovery of displacement component-wise derivatives, the element-wise discontinuous in-plane strain distributions are enhanced to be globally continuous and smoothened. And, using the continuous in-plane strains, the troublesome poor transverse shear stress distributions are enhanced through the thickness-wise integration of static equilibrium equations. The validity of present post-processing method is verified through the comparison with the reference solutions. In addition, the comparative experiments are also performed to investigate the difference between the present method and other available post-processing methods. The numerical results confirm that the present method provides the accurate transverse shear stress distributions which are consistent with the reference solutions and much better than other available methods.