High-accuracy plane stress and plate elements in the quadrature element method

In this paper, a high accuracy and rapid convergence hybrid approach is developed for the Quadrature Element Method (QEM) solution of two-dimensional plane stress and plate bending problems. The hybrid QEM essentially consists of a collocation method in conjunction with a Galerkin ®nite element technique to combine the high accuracy of the Di€erential Quadrature Method (DQM) with the generality of ®nite element formulations. This results in superior accuracy with fewer degrees of freedom than conventional FEM or FDM. The present method also extends the general application of the collocation numerical approach to fourth-order governing equation systems. Here, the in¯uence of collocation point location is investigated. A series of numerical tests is conducted in order to assess the performance of the quadrature plane stress and plate elements in static problem