• Journal of the Computational Structural Engineering Institute of Korea
• /
• v.31 no.2
• /
• pp.71-78
• /
• 2018

This paper presents the assembling of multiple patches based on the single patch isogeometric formulation for the shear deformable shell element given in the previous study. The geometrically exact shell formulation has been accomplished with the shell theory based formulation and the generalized curvilinear coordinate system directly derived from the given NURBS geometry. For the knot elements matching across adjacent surfaces, the zero-th and first parametric continuity conditions are considered and the corresponding coupling constraints are implemented by a master-slave formulation between adjacent patches. The constraints are then enforced by a substitution method for condensation of the slave variables, thereby reducing the model size. Through numerical investigations, the important features of the first parametric continuity condition are confirmed. The performance of the multi-patch shell models is also examined comparing the rate of convergence of response coefficients for the zero and first order continuity conditions and continuity in coupling boundary between two patches is confirmed.