A co-rotational, updated Lagrangian formulation for geometrically nonlinear finite element analysis of shell structures

Abstract A co-rotational, updated Lagrangian formulation for geometrically nonlinear analysis of shells is presented. In this finite element procedure, a standard updated Lagrangian formulation is employed to generate the tangent stiffness matrix, and a co-rotational theory is used for updating element strain, stress and internal force vectors during the Newton-Raphson iterations. Large rotation theory has been accommodated to take into account the nonvectorial characteristic of the rotational degrees-of-freedom. The present procedure is ideally suited for implementation in existing linear finite element programs and its effectiveness has been demonstrated by a number of numerical examples.

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