We present an approach to implement the Tangential Differential Calculus (TDC) for a variety of thin-walled structures (beams, membranes, shells) in the framework of nonlinear kinematics and/or material behaviour.
In contrast to classical formulations the TDC describes kinematics, equilibrium and constitutive relation of the thin structure (as two-dimensional manifold) on the basis of a full three-dimensional deformation state. This allows to introduce the undeformed configuration of e.g. a shell directly in terms of a mesh of topological dimension 2 and geometrical dimension 3. Of particular interest is the use of finite elements of higher-order geometrical order to capture the (interpolated) curvature of the manifold with high accuracy. Numerical examples and reference implementations of this work to support nonlinear stress and post-buckling analyses (using a realisation of the classical arc-length method in FEniCSx) will be provided as a part of the package dolfiny (https://github.com/michalhabera/dolfiny)
