The effects of selected membrane, plate and flat shell finite element formulations on optimal topologies are numerically investigated. Two different membrane components are considered. The first is a standard 4-node bilinear quadrilateral, and the other is a 4-node element accounting for in-plane (drilling) rotations. Plate elements selected for evaluation include discrete Kirchhoff quadrilater...

A model is provided for crack problem in a functionally graded semi-infinite plate under an anti-plane load. The characteristic of material behavior is assumed to change in a linear manner along the plate length. Also the embedded crack is placed in the direction of the material change. The problem is solved using two separate techniques. Primary, by applying Laplace and Fourier transformation,...

A P1-nonconforming quadrilateral finite element is introduced for second-order elliptic problems in two dimensions. Unlike the usual quadrilateral nonconforming finite elements, which contain quadratic polynomials or polynomials of degree greater than 2, our element consists of only piecewise linear polynomials that are continuous at the midpoints of edges. One of the benefits of using our elem...

The purpose of this study was to compare the results of different hierarchical models in engineering analysis applied to dentistry with 2D and 3D models of a tooth and its supporting structures under 100 N occlusal loading at 45° and examine the reliability of simplified 2D models in dental research. Five models were built from computed-tomography scans: four 2D models with Plane Strain and Pla...

We consider a quadrilateral ’mini’ finite element for approximating the solution of Stokes equations using a quadrilateral mesh. We use the standard bilinear finite element space enriched with element-wise defined bubble functions for the velocity and the standard bilinear finite element space for the pressure space. With a simple modification of the standard bubble function we show that a sing...

We consider the approximation properties of quadrilateral finite element spaces of vector fields defined by the Piola transform, extending results previously obtained for scalar approximation. The finite element spaces are constructed starting with a given finite dimensional space of vector fields on a square reference element, which is then transformed to a space of vector fields on each conve...

This paper presents a computational method for quadrilateral meshing of a thin, or narrow, two-dimensional domain for finite element analysis. The proposed method creates a well-shaped single-layered, multi-layered, or partially multi-layered quadrilateral mesh. Element sizes can be uniform or graded. A high quality, layered quadrilateral mesh is often required for finite element analysis of a ...

General strategy for developing finite elements of general geometric shape explained on quadrilateral folded plate structure element ensuring invariance properties is presented in this paper. The basic idea of this strategy consists in using the natural coordinate system only for defining the element geometry and performing the element integration in a mapped biunit square. For defining the app...

This paper develops a computational model for nonlinear bending analysis of functionally graded (FG) plates using a four-node quadrilateral element SQ4T within the context of the first order shear deformation theory (FSDT). In particular, the construction of the nonlinear geometric equations are based on Total Lagrangian approach in which the motion at the present state compared with the initia...

In this paper, a plane quadrilateral element with rotational degrees of freedom is developed. Present formulation is based on a hybrid functional with independent boundary displacement and internal optimum strain field. All the optimality constraints, including being rotational invariant, omitting the parasitic shear error and satisfying Fliepa’s pure bending test, are considered. Moreover, the...