Explicit through-thickness integration schemes for geometric nonlinear analysis of laminated composite shells

Degenerated shell elements were found to be attractive in solving homogeneous shell problems. Direct extension of the same to layered shells becomes computationally inefficient as, in the computation of element matrices, 3-D numerical integration in each layer and summation over the layers have to be carried out. In order to make the formulation efficient, explicit through-thickness schemes have been devised for linear problems. The present paper deals with the extension of the same to geometric nonlinear problems with options of small and large rotations. The explicit through-thickness integration becomes possible due to the assumption on the variation of inverse Jacobian through the thickness. Depending on the assumptions, three different schemes under large and small rotation cases have been presented and their relative numerical accuracy and computational efficiency have been evaluated. It has been observed that there is no sacrifice on the numerical accuracy due to the assumptions leading to the explicit through-thickness integration, but at the same time, there is considerable saving in the computational time. The computational efficiency improves as the number of layers in the laminate increases. The small rotation formulation with the assumption of linear variation of Jacobian inverse across the thickness and based on further approximation regarding certain submatrices is seen to be computationally efficient, as applied to geometric nonlinear layered shell problems.