Afinite-straincorotationaltriangularshellelement-AIMETA.PDFVIP

A finite-strain corotational triangular shell element Federica Caselli, Paolo Bisegna Department of Civil Engineering and Computer Science, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, Italy E-mail: {caselli, bisegna}@ing.uniroma2.it Keywords: Shell finite elements, corotational formulation, finite strain, hyperelastic materials. SUMMARY. An original three-node facet-shell element suited for the analysis of thin hyperelastic shells undergoing large displacements, large rotations, flexure and large membrane strains is pre- sented. 1 INTRODUCTION Shell structures are widely used in engineering practice, e.g., in structural, aerospace and biomed- ical applications, and the development of efficient computational models for their analysis well into the nonlinear regime has been receiving continuous attention in the last decades. The finite element method has promoted the most significant advances in computational shell mechanics. Different types of finite elements have been developed for the analysis of shell structures, including solid 3D elements, continuum-based (or degenerated) shell elements, 2D elements based on a shell theory, flat elements. The latter are especially attractive due to their simplicity. In particular, flat triangular elements combined with a corotational formulation have gained increasing attention in recent years [1]. The corotational formulation (see e.g. [2]) is based on the idea of separating rigid body motions from strain producing ones and has had an excellent track record for problems with arbitrarily large displacements and small strain response. In fact, in those cases, existing high-performance linear el- ements can be reused as core elements in the geometrically nonlinear context, after large rigid body motions have been filtered out by the corotational machinery. The restriction to small strain has represented a long standing limitation for the corotational approach. In order to allow th