The TDNNS method for Reissner-Mindlin plates

A new family of locking-free finite elements for shear deformable Reissner-Mindlin plates is presented. The elements are based on the "tangential-displacement normal-normal-stress" formulation of elasticity. In this formulation, the bending moments are treated as separate unknowns. The degrees of freedom for the plate element are the nodal values of the deflection, tangential components of the rotations and normal-normal components of the bending strain. Contrary to other plate bending elements, no special treatment for the shear term such as reduced integration is necessary. The elements attain an optimal order of convergence

A Reissner-Mindlin plate formulation using symmetric Hu-Zhang elements via polytopal transformations

In this work we develop new finite element discretisations of the shear-deformable Reissner--Mindlin plate problem based on the Hellinger-Reissner principle of symmetric stresses. Specifically, we use conforming Hu-Zhang elements to discretise the bending moments in the space of symmetric square integrable fields with a square integrable divergence $\boldsymbol{M} \in \mathcal{HZ} \subset H^{\mathrm{sym}}(\mathrm{Div})$. The latter results in highly accurate approximations of the bending moments $\boldsymbol{M}$ and in the rotation field being in the discontinuous Lebesgue space $\boldsymbol{\phi} \in [L]^2$, such that the Kirchhoff-Love constraint can be satisfied for $t \to 0$. In order to preserve optimal convergence rates across all variables for the case $t \to 0$, we present an extension of the formulation using Raviart-Thomas elements for the shear stress $\mathbf{q} \in \mathcal{RT} \subset H(\mathrm{div})$. We prove existence and uniqueness in the continuous setting and rely on exact complexes for inheritance of well-posedness in the discrete setting. This work introduces an efficient construction of the Hu-Zhang base functions on the reference element via the polytopal template methodology and Legendre polynomials, making it applicable to hp-FEM. The base functions on the reference element are then mapped to the physical element using novel polytopal transformations, which are suitable also for curved geometries. The robustness of the formulations and the construction of the Hu-Zhang element are tested for shear-locking, curved geometries and an L-shaped domain with a singularity in the bending moments $\boldsymbol{M}$. Further, we compare the performance of the novel formulations with the primal-, MITC- and recently introduced TDNNS methods.Comment: Additional implementation material in: https://github.com/Askys/NGSolve_HuZhang_Elemen

Novel H(symCurl)H(\mathrm{sym} \mathrm{Curl})-conforming finite elements for the relaxed micromorphic sequence

In this work we construct novel $H(\mathrm{sym} \mathrm{Curl})$-conforming finite elements for the recently introduced relaxed micromorphic sequence, which can be considered as the completion of the $\mathrm{div} \mathrm{Div}$-sequence with respect to the $H(\mathrm{sym} \mathrm{Curl})$-space. The elements respect $H(\mathrm{Curl})$-regularity and their lowest order versions converge optimally for $[H(\mathrm{sym} \mathrm{Curl}) \setminus H(\mathrm{Curl})]$-fields. This work introduces a detailed construction, proofs of linear independence and conformity of the basis, and numerical examples. Further, we demonstrate an application to the computation of metamaterials with the relaxed micromorphic model

Mixed finite elements for Kirchhoff-Love plate bending

We present a mixed finite element method with parallelogram meshes for the Kirchhoff-Love plate bending model. Critical ingredient is the construction of appropriate basis functions that are conforming in terms of a sufficiently large tensor space and allow for any kind of physically relevant Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions. For Dirichlet boundary conditions, and polygonal convex or non-convex plates that can be discretized by parallelogram meshes, we prove quasi-optimal convergence of the mixed scheme. Numerical results for regular and singular examples with different boundary conditions illustrate our findings.Comment: corrected versio