The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

A Thick Plate Finite Element with an Exact Thin Limit

Auricchio, Ferdinando; Taylor, Robert L.

UCB/SEMM-1993/12, Dept. of Civil Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1993-10, 40 pages

A quadrilateral finite element developed within the framework of a shear deformable plate theory is presented briefly. The element takes advantage of internal rotational degrees of freedom through the use of bubble functions, and a linked interpolation between the transverse displacement and the rotations. Results from several numerical examples are presented.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-93-12.pdf (3 MB)