Hierarchic finite elements with selective and uniform reduced integration for Reissner-Mindlin plates

It is well known that the numerical solution of Reissner-Mindlin plates degenerates very rapidly for small thickness (locking phenomenon) when standard finite elements are used for the approximation. We have introduced a family of hierarchic high order finite elements in order to assess reliability and robustness with respect to the locking behavior. In a previous note we have given numerical results obtained with exact numerical integration. In this paper we present the results obtained with selective and uniform reduced integration. The results show that, compared with exact integration, selective reduced techniques improve the quality of the numerical performance and are preferable since computational cost is made smaller.