On the mitigation of shear locking in laminated plates through p-version refinement

Abstract

Abstract This article presents an evaluation of higher-order p-version plate elements in the mitigation of shear locking phenomenon in the analysis of multi-layered structures. Carrera Unified Formulation (CUF) is employed to construct the refined plate finite element models. The decomposition of strain energy components is introduced and used in the assessment of shear locking. The evolution of the displacement and stress solutions and the strain energy components with the increase of the polynomial degree of the p-version elements are reported. Reduced and selective integration techniques on p-version plate elements to alleviate locking are explored. Numerical results show that plain p-version plate elements with sufficient, higher-order shape functions are capable of mitigating shear locking effectively.