Displacement-Based Shell Finite Elements

In this chapter, we describe and analyze the main strategies that have been proposed and used to formulate displacement-based finite element procedures for shells. By displacement-based we mean that the finite element solution is obtained by directly applying the variational principle in the finite element space which discretizes the space of admissible displacements for the structure. In particular, this implies that no “numerical trick” — such as reduced integration — is used in the formulation.