Development of the large increment method in analysis for thin and moderately thick plates

Many displacement-based quadrilateral plate elements based on Mindlin-Reissner plate theory have been proposed to analyze the thin and moderately thick plate problems. However, numerical inaccuracies of some elements appear since the presence of shear locking and spurious zero energy modes for thin plate problems. To overcome these shortcomings, we employ the large increment method (LIM) for the analyses of the plate bending problems, and propose a force-based 8-node quadrilateral plate (8NQP) element which is based on Mindlin-Reissner plate theory and has no extra spurious zero energy mode. Several benchmark plate bending problems are presented to illustrate the accuracy and convergence of the plate element by comparing with the analytical solutions and displacement-based plate elements. The results show that the 8-node plate element produces fast convergence and accurate stress distributions in both the moderately thick and thin plate bending problems. The plate element is insensitive to mesh distortion and it can avoid the shear locking for thin plate analysis.