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Civil-Comp Proceedings
ISSN 1759-3433
CCP: 88
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NINTH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON COMPUTATIONAL STRUCTURES TECHNOLOGY
Edited by: B.H.V. Topping and M. Papadrakakis
Paper 134

A New Triangular Flat Shell Element with Drilling Rotations

L. Damkilde

Esbjerg Department of Engineering, Aalborg University Esbjerg, Denmark

Full Bibliographic Reference for this paper
L. Damkilde, "A New Triangular Flat Shell Element with Drilling Rotations", in B.H.V. Topping, M. Papadrakakis, (Editors), "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Computational Structures Technology", Civil-Comp Press, Stirlingshire, UK, Paper 134, 2008. doi:10.4203/ccp.88.134
Keywords: membrane element, shell elements, drilling rotations, flat shell.

Summary
A new flat triangular shell element has been developed based on a newly developed triangular plate bending element by the author [1] and a new triangular membrane element with drilling degrees of freedom. The advantage of the drilling degree of freedom is that no special precautions have to be made in connecting with assembly of elements. Due to the drilling rotations all nodal degrees of freedom have stiffness, and therefore no artificial suppression of degrees of freedom are needed for flat or almost flat parts of the shell structure.

The new membrane element has twelve degrees of freedom and the only difference from the well-known linear strain triangular (LST) element is that the displacements perpendicular to the element sides at the mid-side nodes are replaced by rotations at the corner nodes. Compared to Allman's plane element which was the first successfull implementation of drilling rotations the proposed element has extra displacements in the mid-side nodes parallel to the element sides. The performance is therefore expected to be better and closer to the LST-element which numerical tests also confirm.

The triangular plate bending element can represent a linear bending stress, and is therefore well suited for the membrane element. The nodal degrees of freedom are chosen as a displacement and two rotations in each corner node and a rotation along each element side. The element has almost the same accuracy as the Clough-Tocher element but with a much simpler formulation.

The accuracy of the new shell element is demonstrated by classical examples taken from literature and compared to other shell elements.

References
1
L. Damkilde, "A new accurate but simple plate bending element with linear bending strains", In Proceedings of 13th Nordic Seminar on Computational mechanics, pp. 155-158, 2000.

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