A novel 'boundary layer' finite element for the efficient analysis of thin cylindrical shells

摘要

Classical shell finite elements usually employ low-order polynomial shape functions to interpolate between nodal displacement and rotational degrees of freedom. Consequently, carefully-designed fine meshes are often required to accurately capture regions of high local curvature, such as at the ' boundary layer ' of bending that occurs in cylindrical shells near a boundary or discontinuity. This significantly increases the computational cost of any analysis.