Elasto-plastic large deformation analysis of multi-patch thin shells by isogeometric approach

TL;DR

This paper presents an efficient isogeometric method for analyzing large elasto-plastic deformations in multi-patch thin shells, allowing arbitrary material models and simplified patch connectivity.

Contribution

It introduces a bending strip method to connect patches without strict C1 continuity, enabling flexible multi-patch modeling with arbitrary nonlinear materials.

Findings

Effective handling of multi-patch shells with C0 continuity

Incorporation of hyperelasticity and plasticity models

Validated through numerical benchmarks

Abstract

This paper studies elasto-plastic large deformation behavior of thin shell structures using the isogeometric computational approach with the main focus on the efficiency in modelling the multi-patches and arbitrary material formulations. In terms of modelling, we employ the bending strip method to connect the patches in the structure. The incorporation of bending strips allows to eliminate the strict demand of the C1 continuity condition, which is postulated in the Kirchhoff-Love theory for thin shell, and therefore it enables us to use the standard multi-patch structure even with C0 continuity along the patch boundaries. Furthermore, arbitrary nonlinear material models such as hyperelasticity and finite strain plasticity are embedded in the shell formulation, from which a unified thin shell formulation can be achieved. In terms of analysis, the Bezier decomposition concept is used to retain the local support of the traditional finite element. The performance of the presented approach is verified through several numerical benchmarks.