Accurate, Efficient, and Robust Q4-Like Membrane Elements Formulated in Cartesian Coordinates Using the Quasi-Conforming Element Technique

By using the quasi-conforming element technique, two four-node quadrilateral membrane elements with 2 degrees of freedom at each node (Q4-like membrane element) are formulated in rectangular Cartesian coordinates. One of the four-node quadrilateral membrane elements is based on the assumed strain field with only five independent strain parameters and accounting for the Poisson effect explicitly. There are no independent internal parameters and numerical integration involved in the evaluation of the strain parameters in these four-node quadrilateral membrane elements, and their element stiffness matrices are computed explicitly in Cartesian coordinates. Consequently, the formulation of these four-node quadrilateral membrane elements is extremely simple, and the resulting elements are very computationally efficient. These two quasi-conforming quadrilateral membrane elements pass the patch test and are free from shear locking and insensitive to the element distortion in the range of practical application. The numerical result comparison with other four-node quadrilateral membrane elements, including Q4-like plane elements with drilling degrees of freedom and the Q6-type isoparametric elements with very complicated nonconforming modes, shows that the present quasi-conforming quadrilateral membrane elements are not only reliable and robust, but also very accurate in both displacement and stress evaluations in the analysis of practical plane elasticity problems.