Based on Kirchhoff's thin plate assumption, a simple, displacement-based 4-node, 24-DOF layered cylindrical quadrilateral flat plate/shell element, which combines a 4-node quadrilateral membrane element with drilling or rotational degrees of freedom, and a refined non-conforming 4-node 12-DOF quadrilateral plate bending element RPQ4, is proposed in this paper for the geometric and material nonlinear analysis of reinforced concrete cylindrical shell structures. The element is employed to investigate the nonlinear structural behavior of a reinforced concrete shallow arch, and the agreements between the computed results of the shallow reinforced-concrete arch and those obtained from experiment study provide validation of the proposed finite element model.
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