New mixed plate-bending elements with shear strain interpolations

This paper is concerned with two mixed plate-bending elements with shear strain interpolations, a quadrilateral element and an 8-node serendipity-type element based on discussions on the element proposed in Ref.[1]. The shear strains and inner-forces in the natural coordinates are interpolated in an element and then transformed into Cartesian coordinates in accordance with covariant and contravariant tensor transformations, respectively. The quadrilateral element coincides with the element in Ref.[1] when it is rectangular. Numerical examples show that the two new elements are free from shear locking and spurious kinematic modes under regular and irregular meshes and have the advantages of being insensitive to element distortion and able to give fairly accurate results.The Project supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China.