Design principles and error analysis for reduced-shear plate-bending finite elements

Summary. In this paper, we consider the problem of designing plate-bending elements which are free of shear locking. This phenomenon is known to afflict several elements for the Reissner-Mindlin plate model when the thickness of the plate is small, due to the inability of the approximating subspaces to satisfy the Kirchhoff constraint. To avoid locking, a “reduction operator” is often applied to the stress, to modify the variational formulation and reduce the effect of this constraint. We investigate the conditions required on such reduction operators to ensure that the approximability and consistency errors are of the right order. A set of sufficient conditions is presented, under which optimal errors can be obtained – these are derived directly, without transforming the problem via a Hemholtz decomposition, or considering it as a mixed method. Our analysis explicitly takes into account boundary layers and their resolution, and we prove, via an asymptotic analysis, that convergence of the finite element approximations will occur uniformly as , even on quasiuniform meshes. The analysis is carried out in the case of a free boundary, where the boundary layer is known to be strong. We also propose and analyze a simple post-processing scheme for the shear stress. Our general theory is used to analyze the well-known MITC elements for the Reissner-Mindlin plate. As we show, the theory makes it possible to analyze both straight and curved elements. We also analyze some other elements. Received June 19, 1995