A GENERAL METHODOLOGY FOR DERIVING SHEAR CONSTRAINED REISSNER-MINDLIN PLATE ELEMENTS

In this paper the necessary requirements for the good behaviour of shear constrained Reissner-Mindlin plate elements for thick and thin plate situations are re-interpreted and a simple explicit form of the substitute shear strain matrix is obtained. This extends the previous work of the authors presented in References 18 and 31. The general methodology is applied to the re-formulation of some well known quadrilateral plate elements and some new triangular and quadrilateral plate elements which show promising features. Some examples of the good behaviour of these elements are given.