Unified approach for shear-locking-free triangular and rectangular shell finite elements

A new concept for the construction of locking-free finite elements for bending of shear deformable plates and shells, called DSG (Discrete Shear Gap) method, is presented. The method is based on a pure displacement formulation and utilizes only the usual displacement and rotational degrees of freedom (dof) at the nodes, without additional internal parameters, bubble modes, edge rotations or whatever. One unique rule is derived which can be applied to both triangular and rectangular elements of arbitrary polynomial order. Due to the nature of the method, the order of numerical integration can be reduced, thus the elements are actually cheaper than displacement elements with respect to computation time. The resulting triangular elements prove to perform particularly well in comparison with existing elements. The rectangular elements have a certain relation to the Assumed Natural Strain (ANS) or MITC-elements, in the case of a bilinear interpolation, they are even identical.