HYBRID STRAIN-BASED 3-NODE FLAT TRIANGULAR SHELL ELEMENTS .2. NUMERICAL INVESTIGATION OF NONLINEAR PROBLEMS

In a companion paper [M. L. Liu and C. W. S. To, Comput. Struct. 54, 1 031-1056 (1995)] theories and incremental formulation of nonlinear she ll structures discretized by the finite element method are discussed. The updated Lagrangian formulation and the incremental Hellinger-Reiss ner variational principle are adopted. The independently assumed field s employed are the incremental displacements and incremental strains. Based on the theory and incremental formulation explicit element stiff ness and mass matrices of three node flat triangular shell finite elem ents are derived. In the present paper the derived element matrices ar e applied to nine examples. The latter include static and dynamic resp onse analysis of shell structures with geometrical, material, and geom etrical and material nonlinearities. The formulation adopted and eleme nt matrices derived are found to be accurate, flexible and applicable to various types of shell structures with geometrical and material non linearities.