A modified representation of transverse shear in \(C^ 0\) quadrilateral plate elements (Q1085682)

In this paper we present a special treatment of transverse shear components in \(C^ 0\) bilinear and biquadratic plate elements that excludes the occurrence of locking completely and simultaneously allows the full integration of the element stiffness matrix, thus avoiding the development of kinematic modes. The suggested approach rests upon the standard isoparametric description of the kinematic field and only modifies the shear-strain energy without any change of the bending energy. The first step in constructing modified shear strain polynomials consists of expressing the Cartesian components of transverse shear in terms of the normalized coordinates by means of the usual isoparametric transformation. This process brings to light two distinct polynomials expressed in the normalized coordinates which are subsequently modified with the view of eliminating those coefficients which would lead to spurious constraining in the Kirchhoff limit of vanishing shear strains. Numerical examples are presented that illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure.