an 8-node solid-shell finite element based on assumed bending ‎strains and cell-based smoothed membrane strains for static analysis of plates and shells

In this paper, a new 8-node solid-shell finite element is proposed. the transverse shear strains and transverse normal strains of the element are separately interpolated and related to the c0-displacement approximation at tying points to overcome the shear- and trapezoidal-locking phenomena. from the bending strain approximation suggested for degenerated shell elements, the assumed bending strains for the solid-shell element are firstly established. the membrane strains of the element are smoothed on domains defined by dividing the middle surface's element into 1, 2, 3 or 4 sub-cells in accordance with the cellbased strain smoothing (cs) technique. the formulations of the membrane stiffness matrices are explicitly integrated on the boundary lines of the smoothing sub-cells. the proposed csn-q8 element, in which n is the number of smoothing sub-cells, is verified through static analysis of several benchmark plate and shell problems. numerical results show the improved performance of the csn-q8 element in comparison with other references.