Pseudo-transient large deflection analysis of composite and sandwich shells with a refined theory

Abstract

An unified approach is presented for linear and geometrically non-linear analyses of composite and sandwich shells with a refined theory and C⁰ finite elements by using the dynamic relaxation technique. A finite element idealization with a nine noded quadrilateral isoparametric element belonging to the Lagrangian family is used in space discretization. An explicit time stepping scheme is employed for time integration of the resulting discrete ordinary differential equations with special forms of diagonal fictitious mass and/or damping matrices. The accuracy of the formulation is then established by comparing the present pseudo-transient (PT) analysis results with the available 2D/3D analytical and finite element solutions. The usefulness and effectiveness of this approach is established by comparing computational time required by this and Newton-Raphson's (NR) approaches.