A stabilized discrete shear gap finite element for adaptive limit analysis of Mindlin-Reissner plates

This paper presents a numerical formulation for computation of collapse load of Mindlin-Reissner plates that uses stabilized discrete shear gap finite elements and second-order cone programming. Displacement fields are approximated using the discrete shear gap in combination with a stabilized strain smoothing technique, ensuring that shear-locking problem can be avoided and that accurate solutions can be obtained. The underlying optimization problem is formulated in the form of a standard second-order cone programming, so that it can be solved using highly efficient primal-dual interior-point algorithm. An error indicator based on plastic dissipation will be used in the adaptive refinement scheme. Various plates with arbitrary geometries and boundary conditions are examined to illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure. Copyright (c) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.