Mechanical Engineering Commons^™

A Large Deformation, Rotation-Free, Isogeometric Shell, D. J. Benson, Y. Bazilevs, Ming-Chen Hsu, T. J. R. Hughes

Ming-Chen Hsu

Conventional finite shell element formulations use rotational degrees of freedom to describe the motion of the fiber in the Reissner–Mindlin shear deformable shell theory, resulting in an element with five or six degrees of freedom per node. These additional degrees of freedom are frequently the source of convergence difficulties in implicit structural analyses, and, unless the rotational inertias are scaled, control the time step size in explicit analyses. Structural formulations that are based on only the translational degrees of freedom are therefore attractive. Although rotation-free formulations using C0 basis functions are possible, they are complicated in comparison to their C1 …