Improvement on the 10-node tetrahedral element for three-dimensional problems Original Research Article

By decomposing the strain part of the conforming 10-node tetrahedral element T10 and relaxing the compatibility condition for the constant strain term, the performance of the element can be improved. By introducing the incompressible condition in the high order strain term, the element can be made very efficient for the analysis of the nearly incompressible problem. Numerical results show that the modified element, in general, has better accuracy and reliability compared to the classical displacement-based tetrahedral element T10 for a wide range of structural problems, including the analysis of thin and slender structures.