Testing of Kriging-based Finite Element Method to Shell Structures with Varying Thickness

A variant of the finite element method with Kriging basis functions has been recently developed and applied to plane, plate bending, and shell elastostatic problems. The main advantage of this novel method is that high degree of basis functions can be easily constructed without additional finite element nodes (such as mid-side and inner nodes).This paper revisits the formulation of the Kriging-based finite element method for analysis of curved shell structures, referred to as K-Shell, and presents new numerical tests to shell structures with varying thickness. The K-Shell was formulated based on degenerated 3D elasticity theory. The basis functions were constructed using a set of nodes covering several layers of triangular elements and were employed to approximate both the displacement and geometry. The quartic polynomial basis was chosen to alleviate shear and membrane
locking. The K-Shell has been tested using a series of shell benchmark problems with constant shell thickness. The tests showed
that K-Shell performed very well in analyzing moderately thick smooth shells. In this paper the K-Shell is tested using two modified shell benchmark problems with varying thickness, i.e. the modified pinched cylinder and the modified hemispherical shell with 18 degrees cut-off. The converged results of three-dimensional finite element model using commercial software Abaqus were used to assess the convergence of the results. The tests show that the performance of K-Shell in analyzing shells with varying thickness is satisfactory.