• Journal of the Earthquake Engineering Society of Korea
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.37-52
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• 2012

In this study, a new 4-node general shell element with 6 DOFs per node is presented. Drilling rotational degrees of freedom are introduced by the variational principle with an independent rotation field. In formulation of the element, substitute transverse shear strain fields are used to avoid shear locking, while four nonconforming modes are applied in the in-plane displacement fields as a remedy for membrane locking. In addition, a direct modification method for nonconforming modes is employed in the numerical implementation of nonconforming modes to represent constant strain states. A 9-points integration rule is adopted for volume integration in the computation of the element stiffness matrix. With the combined use of these techniques, the developed shell element has no spurious zero energy modes, and can represent a constant strain state. Several numerical tests are carried out to evaluate the performance of the new element developed. The test results show that the behavior of the elements is satisfactory.