Efficient large deflection analysis of elasto-plastic thin shells of revolution

The paper presents an extension of a stress resultant based axisymmetric shell element by Reissner to the elasto-plastic computations. In the elastic range, the element exhibits exact kinematics for large displacements and rotations thus enabling the use of large increments in the global equilibrium path continuation. In order to preserve this desired property also in the elasto-plastic range, the general closest point projection algorithm is utilized for the elasto-plastic stress increment computation. In the case of the used element, consistent linearization of the stress updating algorithm results in a very simple form so that the element offers an efficient and computationally cheap approach to the large deflection elasto-plastic axisymmetric shell problems. Copyright (C) 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.