Low-Order Laminated Lock-Free Beam And Plate Elements Based On Coupled Displacement Field

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the behaviour of low-order beam and plate elements especially for their application to laminated structures. The merits and dements of the existing elements are brought out and new low-order elements with better interpolation polynomials are proposed.

Two new beam elements are proposed for laminated composite beams that yield better representation of twist due to material coupling. Out of the two elements developed, one is based on the conventional formulation and the other on the coupled-field formulation, both capturing material induced coupling. The beam developed using coupled field formulation shows a novel way of obtaining a fully coupled interpolation function for field variables using the complete set of equilibrium equations for the composite beams. The element has shown a superior coarse mesh performance. These elements can practically capture plate behaviour in beam elements for a wide range of plate thickness.

The locking problems in conventional 4-node quadrilateral elements, such as shear locking and geometric locking are studied. Various techniques available in literature to remedy these problems are also studied. A suite of QUAD4 with conventional techniques such as. Reduced Integration, Field Consistency, Mixed Interpolation of Tensorial strain Components, Assumed Natural Strain, Discrete Shear Gap, Incompatible modes Q6 and QM6 is developed. An effort is made to combine these techniques to develop new element that yields improved performance. The element is shown to exhibit improved performance for certain cases.

Several four-node rectangular elements are developed based on the coupled-field techniques. First two new-coupled elements are formulated that employ Sabir's [101] plane bending formulation with drilling degree of freedom, and the plate bending rotations are generated using equilibrium equations. However, since Sabir's plane bending interpolation polynomials yielded inaccurate performance for composites, it led to development of elements with fully coupled field formulations.

Finally, two new 4-node rectangular elements are developed using coupled-field formulations with six and seven dof freedom per node respectively. Here the interpolation polynomials are derived using the complete equilibrium equations. The elements are extensively tested for static deflection, dynamics and buckling of isotropic and laminated plates/beams. The elements show superior coarse mesh convergence. Several problems pertaining to vibration and buckling of composite plates/beams are solved using the elements developed in this work.