Quadratic NMS Mindlin-plate-bending element

Abstract

The development of a robust and efficient quadratic Mindlin-plate-bending elements mainly by the use of non-conforming displacement modes is presented in this paper. A brief review on the previous efforts to develop efficient non-conforming Mindlin plate bending elements is also given. The behaviour of the newly proposed plate element is further improved by the combined use of nonconforming displacement modes, the selectively reduced integration scheme, and the assumed shear strain fields. Thus, the newly developed element has been designated as 'NMS-8P'. The improvement achieved may be attributable to the fact that the merits of these improvement techniques are merged in the formation of the new element in a complementary manner. The proposed 8-node element passes the patch tests, does not show spurious mechanism, and does not produce shear locking phenomena even with distorted meshes. It is also shown that the element produces reliable solutions through numerical tests for standard benchmark problems. Copyright (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.