Large displacement analysis of thin plates and shells using a flat facet finite element formulation

The large displacement analysis of flat faceted shell element, previously developed by Meek and Tan [15] is further developed. This element, has been already tested in the nonlinear range via the use of the total Lagrangian formulation and a somewhat cumbersome procedure for the calculation of the joint orientation matrices at each step of the calculations [25]. However, this approach is quite complex and by taking advantage of the positions of the rotational degrees of freedom, being located at the Loof nodes along the edges and normal to the edges, a simple and elegant formulation is obtained. The theory is developed in incremental form and the updated Lagrangian approach with the co-rotational formulation is employed. Numerical examples are presented and compared with other published results to verify the proposed formulation.