A SIMPLE AND EFFECTIVE ELEMENT FOR GENERAL ANALYSIS OF THIN-SHELL STRUCTURES

Based on brief comments on sotne recent development of membrane elements and thin-Plate bending elements, a simple flat quadrilateral shell element with 24 d.o.f. for elastic analysis is presented by superimposing IDKQ bending and AQ membrane stiffness matries. Numerical results and engineerng practices show that this shell element is simple, effective and accurate, and is very suitable for analysing complicated engineering structures because of the presence of rotational degrees of freedom about its normals.