An assumed-stress hybrid 4-node shell element with drilling degrees of freedom

An assumed-stress hybrid/mixed 4-node quadrilateral shell element is introduced that alleviates most of the deficiencies associated with such elements. The formulation of the element is based on the assumed-stress hybrid/mixed method using the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. The membrane part of the element has 12 degrees of freedom including rotational or 'drilling' degrees of freedom at the nodes. The bending part of the element also has 12 degrees of freedom. The bending part of the element uses the Reissner-Mindlin plate theory which takes into account the transverse shear contributions. The element formulation is derived from an 8-node isoparametric element by expressing the midside displacement degrees of freedom in terms of displacement and rotational degrees of freedom at corner nodes. The element passes the patch test, is nearly insensitive to mesh distortion, does not 'lock', possesses the desirable invariance properties, has no hidden spurious modes, and for the majority of test cases used in this paper produces more accurate results than the other elements employed herein for comparison.