Small-strain shell elements in Abaqus/Explicit

The small-strain shell elements in Abaqus/Explicit use a Mindlin-Reissner type of flexural theory that includes transverse shear. The elements are based on a corotational velocity-strain formulation described by Belytschko et al. (1984, 1992). A corotational finite element formulation reduces the complexities of nonlinear mechanics by embedding a local coordinate system in each element at the sampling point of that element. By expressing the element kinematics in a local coordinate frame, the number of computations is reduced substantially. Therefore, the corotational velocity-strain formulation provides significant speed advantages in explicit time integration software, where element computations can dominate during the overall solution process.

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Choosing a Shell Element

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