The treatment of “pinching locking” in -shell elements
We consider a family of shell finite elements with quadratic displacements across the thickness. These elements are very attractive, but compared to standard general shell elements they face another source of numerical locking in addition to shear and membrane locking. This additional locking phenomenon – that we call “pinching locking” – is the subject of this paper and we analyse a numerical strategy designed to overcome this difficulty. Using a model problem in which only this specific source...