The Use of 9-Parameter Shell Theory for Development of Exact Geometry 12-Node Quadrilateral Piezoelectric Laminated Solid-Shell Elements

The present work focuses on the development of the exact geometry (EG) 12-node piezoelectric solid-shell element with three translational degrees of freedom per node. The term “EG” reflects the fact that coefficients of the first and second fundamental forms of the reference surface are taken exactly at each element node. The finite element formulation developed is based on the higher-order 9-parameter equivalent single-layer shell theory accounting for thickness stretching, which permits the use of 3D constitutive equations. In this theory, we introduce three sampling surfaces, namely, bottom, middle, and top, and choose nine displacements of these surfaces as basic shell unknowns. Such a way allows one to represent the EG piezoelectric solid-shell element formulation in a very compact form and to derive the strain-displacement equations, which describe exactly all rigid-body shell motions in any convected curvilinear coordinate system. The element matrices are evaluated through the use of 3D analytical integration by employing the extended ANS method. To avoid shear and membrane locking and have no spurious zero energy modes, the assumed displacement-independent strains and stress resultants fields are invoked.