Avoiding Membrane Locking with Regge Interpolation
In this paper a novel method to overcome membrane locking of thin shells is presented. An interpolation operator into the so-called Regge finite element space is inserted in the membrane energy term to weaken the implicitly given kernel constraints. Due to the tangential-tangential continuity of Regge elements, the number of constraints is asymptotically halved on triangular meshes compared to reduced integration techniques. Provided the interpolant, this approach can be incorporated easily to any shell element. The performance of the proposed method is demonstrated by means of several benchmark examples.
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