RECENT ADVANCES IN THE P-VERSION OF THE FINITE-ELEMENT METHOD FOR SHELLS

Research efforts aimed at optimizing the computational efficiency of t he p-method are described. These include (i) a novel quadrature scheme for hierarchical shell elements, (ii) a family of assumed strain hier archical shell elements, (iii) selective polynomial order escalation f or assumed strain elements, and (iv) accelerated multigrid-like soluti on procedures. Numerical experiments indicate that with these enhancem ents it is possible to speed up the overall computational time of p-me thod for analysis of shells by a factor greater than five for relative ly small problems (less than 10 000 dofs), while computational savings for larger problems are even more significant. It has been found that the performance of the enhanced variant of the p-method for shells is comparable to that of the h-method for low accuracy requirements, and better if higher accuracies are desired.