THE WILSON PLATE BENDING ELEMENT USING THE MEMBRANE-PLATE SIMILARITY THEORY

Numerical experiments have verified the effectiveness of formulating thin plate and shell elements by using the similarity theory between plane elasticity and plate bending. Thus, plane elasticity elements can be transformed into plate bending elements. In this paper, the Wilson element QM6 is transformed into a new four-node, eight D.O.F (degree of freedom) quadrilateral plate bending element. Numerical results of typical problems show that the new plate bending element has very good convergence and high precision. Especially, the behavior of the new plate bending element in patch test is similar to those of QM6. It is shown that the present method can transform non-conforming plane elasticity elements into new plate bending elements and keep the features of transformed elements.