A SHEAR DEFORMATION SHELL THEORY FOR FINITE ROTATIONS AND ITS NUMERICAL-SOLUTION WITH THE FINITE-DIFFERENCE METHOD

For shells undergoing finite deformations (displacements and rotations) a geometrically nonlinear shear-deformation shell theory will be formulated in terms of consistent operators. Starting from the variational principle of Hellinger-Reissner, the characteristic properties of the nonlinear theories will be demonstrated in a very general manner. The paper continues with the incremental formulation, used for the application of the incremental-iterative numerical techniques. For transforming the system of simultaneous differential equations into algebraic equations, the appropriate two-dimensional Hermitian finite-difference operators are described. Finally, the reliability of numerical integration procedure is demonstrated by a selected numerical example.