Stress recovery and error estimation for shell structures

The Penalized Discrete Least-Squares (PDLS) stress recovery (smoothing) technique developed for two-dimensional linear elliptic problems [1-3] is adapted here to three-dimensional shelf structures. The surfaces are restricted to those which have a 2-D parametric representation, or which can be built-up of such surfaces. The proposed strategy involves mapping the finite element results to the 2-D parametric space which describes the geometry, and smoothing is carried out in the parametric space using the PDLS-based Smoothing Element Analysis (SEA). Numerical results for two well-known shell problems are presented to illustrate the performance of SEA/PDLS for these problems. The recovered stresses are used in the Zienkiewicz-Zhu a posteriori error estimator. The estimated errors are used to demonstrate the performance of SEA-recovered stresses in automated adaptive mesh refinement of shell structures. The numerical results are encouraging. Further testing involving more complex, practical structures is necessary. Copyright (C) 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.