Electromagnetic and Thermal Modeling of Composite Materials Using Multilayer Shell Elements

In this paper, a methodology based on shell elements is presented to model the electromagnetic behavior of multilayered conductive composite materials. The standard 3-D finite-element formulation is accomplished by a multilevel shell element representation. This leads to a reduced number of unknowns which improve the system convergence and consequently the computational time. The model developed will be validated with classical 3-D finite-element method and experimental results.