Publications
Dynamic quasistatic characterization of finite elements for shell structures
Finite elements for shell structures have been investigated extensively, with numerous formulations offered in the literature. These elements are vital in modern computational solid mechanics due to their computational efficiency and accuracy for thin and moderately thick shell structures, allowing larger and more comprehensive (e.g. multi-scale and multi-physics) simulations. Problems now of interest in the research and development community are routinely pushing our computational capabilities, and thus shell finite elements are being used to deliver efficient yet high quality computations. Much work in the literature is devoted to the formulation of shell elements and their numerical accuracy, but there is little published work on the computational characterization and comparison of shell elements for modern solid mechanics problems. The present study is a comparison of three disparate shell element formulations in the Sandia National Laboratories massively parallel Sierra Solid Mechanics code. A constant membrane and bending stress shell element (Key and Hoff, 1995), a thick shell hex element (Key et al., 2004) and a 7-parameter shell element (Buechter et al., 1994) are available in Sierra Solid Mechanics for explicit transient dynamic, implicit transient dynamic and quasistatic calculations. Herein these three elements are applied to a set of canonical dynamic and quasistatic problems, and their numerical accuracy, computational efficiency and scalability are investigated. The results show the trade-off between the relative inefficiency and improved accuracy of the latter two high quality element types when compared with the highly optimized and more widely used constant membrane and bending stress shell element.