A PLATE BENDING ELEMENT AS THE COUNTERPART OF PIAN-SUMIHARA HYBRID ELEMENT

The transformation of the typical hybrid stress element of plane elasticity, Pian-Sumihara element, into a plate bending element is studied. First, a direct counterpart of Pian-Sumihara element is constructed using both the pro-variational principle of plate bending and the Pian-Sumihara formulation in stress function space. Secondly, the direct counterpart with stress function as nodal variables is transformed into a plate bending element with deflection and rotation as unknown discrete variables. The plate bending element, with four nodes and eight-DOF (degree of freedom), has explicit formulation and consequently high efficiency in computation. Numerical results of typical problems show that it passes the constant curvature patch test and possesses stable convergence and high accuracy.