Truncated hierarchical B-splines in isogeometric analysis of thin shell structures

This paper presents an isogeometric discretization of Kirchhoff-Love thin shells using truncated hierarchical Bsplines (THB-splines). It is demonstrated that the underlying basis functions are ideally appropriate for adaptive refinement of the so-called thin shell structures in the framework of isogeometric analysis. The proposed approach provides sufficient flexibility for refining basis functions independent of their order. The main advantage of local THB-spline evaluation is that it provides higher degree analysis on tight meshes of arbitrary geometry which makes it well suited for discretizing the KirchhoffLove shell formulation. Numerical results show the versatility and high accuracy of the present method. This study is a part of the efforts by the authors to bridge the gap between CAD and CAE.