Isogeometric collocation for Kirchhoff-Love plates and shells

Abstract With the emergence of isogeometric analysis (IGA), the Galerkin rotation-free discretization of Kirchhoff–Love shells is facilitated, enabling more efficient thin shell structural analysis. High-order shape functions used in IGA also allow the collocation of partial differential equations, avoiding the time-consuming numerical integration of the Galerkin technique. The goal of the present work is to apply this method to NURBS-based isogeometric Kirchhoff–Love plates and shells, under the assumption of small deformations. Since Kirchhoff–Love plate theory yields a fourth-order formulation, two boundary conditions are required at each location on the contour, generating some conflicts at the corners where there are more equations than needed. To remedy this overdetermination, we provide priority and averaging rules that cover all the possible combinations of adjacent edge boundary conditions (i.e. the clamped, simply-supported, symmetric and free supports). Greville and alternative superconvergent points are used for NURBS basis of even and odd degrees, respectively. For square, circular, and annular flat plates, convergence orders are found to be in agreement with a-priori error estimates. The proposed isogeometric collocation method is then validated and benchmarked against a Galerkin implementation by studying a set of problems involving Kirchhoff–Love shells.