Study of the Discrete Shear Gap Technique in Timoshenko Beam Elements

A major difficulty in formulating a finite element for shear-deformable beams, plates, and shells is the shear locking phenomenon. A recently proposed general technique to overcome this difficulty is the discrete shear gap (DSG) technique. In this study, the DSG technique was applied to the linear, quadratic, and cubic Timoshenko beam elements. With this technique, the displacement-based shear strain field was replaced with a substitute shear strain field obtained from the derivative of the interpolated shear gap. A series of numerical tests were conducted to assess the elements performance. The results showed that the DSG technique works perfectly to eliminate the shear locking. The resulting deflection, rotation, bending moment, and shear force distributions were very accurate and converged optimally to the corresponding analytical solutions. Thus the beam elements with the DSG technique are better alternatives than those with the classical selective-reduced integration.