Rectangular Mindlin plate element with a through crack

摘要

This work addresses the development of a new four-noded rectangular Mindlin plate bending element (MP4C) with a crack which consists of three degrees of freedom at each corner node. The crack in the element is assumed to be not closed and non-propagating. The crack affects the elastic strain energy and the flexibility matrix of the element, whereas the mass matrix remains unchanged. The complete element stiffness matrix is constructed as the inverse of the combined flexibility matrix of both non-cracked and cracked elements. To evaluate the behavior of the proposed cracked Mindlin plate element, numerical examples are provided. They are based on developing user subroutines in the commercial finite element software ABAQUS. The finite element analysis results using the developed plate element are in excellent agreement with those reported in previous work. The cracked plate element developed in this paper provides a simple and robust approach to model the real service conditions in plate-like structures.