Analysis of Distortion Parameters of Eight node Serendipity Element on the Elements Performance

Often the result produced using FEM technique on the distorted shaped element gives poor result. Moreover if the results are poor then the design will fail. Eight noded serendipity elements is the most widely used element in 2-D analysis of structures. But despite its benefits it remains distortion sensitive. In the majority of computer programs, automatic mess generation is an integral part of the program. For complex shapes, the automatic grid generation will result in distorted quadrilateral shapes. Thus the solution obtained by using these meshes will produce erroneous results so it becomes necessary to incorporate the distortion measures in to these automatic mesh generations to limit the errors. Here in this paper distortion parameters are defined in terms of the coefficient of the element's shape polynomials and are tested for a range of distortion. Keywords-FEM; serendipity element; distortion parameters