A rotation-free shell element for the analysis of kinked and branching surfaces

FLORES FERNANDO G.; OÑATE EUGENIO

Salzburgo

Conferencia; 5th international conference on Computation of Shells and Spatial Structures; 2005

IASS

This paper extends the capabilities of previous rotation-free shell elements, BST and EBST developed to deal with smooth and homogeneous surfaces, to the analysis of kinked and branching surfaces. The computation of the curvature tensor is first redefined in terms of the angle change between the normals at the adjacent elements. This allows to deal with arbitrary large angles between adjacent elements and to treat kinked surfaces. A relative stiffness between elements is introduced to consider non-homogeneous surfaces. This idea is latter generalized to deal with branching shells. Two linear and a non-linear examples are presented that show that the formulation leads to the correct results.