On the choice of the linear element for corotational triangular shells (Q2382826)

The corotational formulation for triangular thin shell elements presented in [\textit{A. Eriksson} and \textit{C. Pacoste}, ibid. 191, No. 35, 3775--3810 (2002; Zbl 1101.74363)] is developed in order to incorporate elasto-plastic deformations. The main purpose is the choice of linear elements. Several new local linear elements have been implemented. These elements are geometrically linear, and are obtained by the superposition of a membrane and a bending part. The possibility to reuse existing high-performance linear elements in a nonlinear context is founded on the corotational approach. The purpose of the present article is also to introduce the material nonlinearity in the formulation and to test the reliability and efficiency of elements in modeling elasto-plastic instability problems, using both the incremental and deformation theories of plasticity. The present study is limited to thin shells. Several numerical solutions of instability problems in elasticity and elasto-plasticity are presented in order to estimate the efficiency of different local element formulations. It is shown that the proposed linear local element formulations give accurate enough results in instability problems.