A mixed 8-node hexahedral element based on the Hu-Washizu principle and the field extrapolation technique

A mixed eight-node hexahedral element formulated via the Hu-Washizu principle as well as the field extrapolation technique is presented. The mixed element with only three translational degrees of freedom at each node can provide extremely accurate and reliable performance for popular benchmark problems such as spacial beams, plates, shells as well as general three-dimensional elasticity problems. Numerical calculations also show that when extremely skewed and coarse meshes and nearly incompressible materials are used, the proposed mixed element can still possess excellent behaviour. The mixed formulation starts with introduction of a parallelepiped domain associated with the given general eight-node hexahedral element. Then, the assumed strain field at the nodal level is constructed via the Hu-Washizu variational principle for that associated parallelepiped domain. Finally, the assumed strain field at the nodal level of the given hexahedral element is established by using the field extrapolation technique, and then by using the trilinear shape functions the assumed strain field of the whole element domain is obtained. All matrices involved in establishing the element stiffness matrix can be evaluated analytically and expressed explicitly; however, a 24 by 24 matrix has to be inverted to construct the displacement extrapolation matrix. The proposed hexahedral element satisfies the patch test as long as the element with a shape of parallelepiped.