A hybrid stress-assumed transition element for solid-to-beam and plate-to-beam connections

This paper presents a new transition element for modelling solid-to-beam and plate-to-beam connections. The approach is based upon the hybrid stress method and the resulting transition element is hypostatic, i.e. the number of independent stress parameters is less than the number of independent displacements. As a consequence, there are further displacement modes called spurious kinematic modes which are eliminated by means of a suitable “penalty” method. The numerical performance of the proposed element is assessed by a number of relevant tests.