A conforming curved quadrilateral thin plate element for analysis of arbitrarily shaped plates

摘要

This paper presents a sixteen degrees of freedom conforming curved quadrilateral plate element. It is based on Love-Kirchhoff thin plate theory and is useful for analysing arbitrarily shaped plates. The approach consists of mapping entire plate in a parent 2 x 2earo, rj domain using twelve geometry nodes on plate boundaries. The discretisation of plate into elements is achieved by lines of constant earo and r\ mapped on actual plate. The element has four nodes and each node is associated with four displacement parameters - a transverse displacement and three displacement derivatives referred to global curvilinear earo, r\ coordinates. Shape functions based on products of cubic Hermites are used for displacement variation over plate region. Numerical integration is adopted for evaluation of stiffness matrix and load vector. Results of solved examples show good agreement with the available results.