A URI 4-Node quadrilateral element by assumed strain

In this paper one-point quadrature “assumed strain” mixed element formulation based on the Hu-Washizu variational principle is presented. Special care is taken to avoid hourglass modes and volumetric locking as well as shear locking. The assumed strain fields are constructed so that those portions of the fields which lead to volumetric and shear locking phenomena are eliminated by projection, while the implementation of the proposed URI scheme is straightforward to suppress hourglass modes. In order to treat geometric nonlinearities simply and efficiently, a corotational coordinate system is used. Several numerical examples are given to demonstrate the performance of the suggested formulation, including nonlinear static/dynamic mechanical problems.