LINEAR STATIC ANALYSIS OF PLATES AND SHELLS USING A SEMILOOF SHELL FINITE ELEMENT

A quadrilateral thin flat shell element for linear analysis of plates and shells is formulated and numerically tested in this paper. This element is developed by combining a four node Rational Quadrilateral Membrane element with a new 8-node Rational Quadrilateral Discrete Kirchhoff Plate element. Using the rational element method [1] and the Discrete Kirchhoff technique, this shell element is used to solve few benchmark problems and the results are compared with analytical solutions or those available in the literature.