The curved beam/deep arch/finite ring element revisited

Abstract

In this paper, an attempt is made to understand the errors arising in curved finite elements which undergo both flexural and membrane deformations. It is shown that with elements of finite size (i.e. a practical level of discretization at which reasonably accurate results can be expected), there can be errors of a special nature that arise because the membrane strain fields are not consistently interpolated with terms from the two independent field functions that characterize such a problem. These lead to errors, described here as of the 'second kind' and a physical phenomenon called 'membrane locking'. The findings here emerge from recent research on the effect of reduced integration on shallow curved beam elements and on the use of coupled displacement fields in finite rings. The failures which have occurred in earlier attempts to use independent polynomial displacement fields for curved elements may not have been due to neglect of rigid body motions or failure to achieve constant strain states, but because of locking due to spurious constraints. These emerge in the penalty limits of extreme thinness (an inextensional regime), when exact integration of the energy functional of an element based on low order independent interpolations for the in-plane and normal displacements is used. It seems possible to determine optimal integration rules that will allow the extensional deformation of a curved beam/deep arch/finite ring element to be modelled by independently chosen low order polynomial functions and which will recover the inextensional case in the penalty limit of extreme thinness without spurious locking constraints. The much maligned 'cubic in w-lincar in u' curved beam element is now reworked to show its excellent behaviour in all situations. What is emphasized is that the choice of shape functions, or subsequent operations to determine the discretized functionals, must consistently model the physical requirements the problem imposes on the field variables. In this manner, we can restore an old element to respectability and thereby indicate clearly the underlying principles. These are: the importance of 'field consistency' so that arch and shell problems can be modelled consistently by independent polynomial displacement fields, and the role that reduced integration or some equivalent construction can play to achieve this.