Higher-Order Plate Elements for Large Deformation Analysis in Multibody Applications

This study introduces higher-order three-dimensional plate elements based on the absolute nodal coordinate formulation (ANCF) for large deformation multibody applications. The introduced elements employ four to eight nodes and the St. Venant-Kirchhoff material law. A newly proposed eight-node element is carefully verified using various numerical experiments intended to discover possible locking phenomena. In the introduced plate elements, the usage of polynomial approximations of second order in all three directions is found to be advantageous in terms of numerical performance. A comparison of the proposed eight-node element to the introduced four-node higher-order plate elements reveals that the usage of in-plane slopes as nodal degrees of freedom has a negative effect on numerical convergence properties in thin-plate use-cases.