A pure bending exact nodal-averaged shear strain method for finite element plate analysis (Q2512458)

The averaged shear strain method, based on a nodal integration approach, is presented for the finite element analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates. The mixed interpolation of tensorial components (MITC4 plate element) is used. The shear interpolation method from the MITC4 plate element is combined with an area-weighted averaging technique for the nodal integration of shear energy to relieve shear locking in the thin plate analysis as well as to pass the pure bending patch test. A new nodal-averaged shear strain finite element formulation improves the accuracy of the finite element method. In order to resolve the numerical instability caused by the direct nodal integration the bending strain field is computed by a sub-domain nodal integration approach and a modified curvature smoothing scheme. The resulting nodally integrated smoothed strain formulation is shown to contain only the primitive variables and thus can be easily implemented in the existing displacement-based finite element plate formulation. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the present method.