REFINED CONSISTENT FORMULATION OF A CURVED TRIANGULAR FINITE ROTATION SHELL ELEMENT

The present paper considers a finite rotation formulation for curved shell elements with rotations about the element sides as nodal degrees of freedom. Attention is mainly on the derivation of a consistent finite rotation formulation. Significant simplifications of the governing equations are presented. These simplifications lead to more efficient finite element implementations. Numerical examples demonstrate the differences between the present consistent and previous approximate formulations