Adaptive analysis of stiffened structures using stiffened plate bending elements

In this paper we describe an adaptive mesh refinement procedure. The procedure is used in the static analysis of stiffened plate structures using 8-noded stiffened plate bending elements. The procedure described uses an h-version of adaptive refinement based on an error estimate method suggested by Zienkiewicz and Zhu. The concept of error density is introduced in order to develop effective adaptive strategies to determine the mesh size in the adaptive remesh procedure. Examples are presented to illustrate the considerable advantages of this method. The results obtained are compared with those of uniform mesh refinement and the efficiency of the developed remesh strategies