Mesh Adaptation Using a Four-Noded Quadrilateral Plate Bending Element

Engineering Fracture Mechanics, Elsevier, Vol 50, Num 5, pp.737-758, 1995

MESHING
RESEARCH
CORNER

Department of Civil. Mechanical and Environmental Engineering. The George Washington University,
Washington, DC 20052. U.S.A.

Abstract
This paper uses a four-noded quadrilateral Reissner-Mindlin plate bending element for mesh adaptation. To overcome the problems of ~1ocking" in the thin plate limit and zero energy modes the transverse shear strains are not evaluated from the displacements and rotations but are separately interpolated. The element is used in a hierarchical mesh adaptation which ises a node-averaging- based energy norm error estimator. Several examples illustrate the use of the adaptive algorithm.