Application of the quadrilateral area coordinate method: a new element for laminated composite plate bending problems

Recently, some new quadrilateral finite elements were successfully developed by the Quadrilateral Area Coordinate (QAC) method. Compared with those traditional models using isoparametric coordinates, these new models are less sensitive to mesh distortion. In this paper, a new displacement-based, 4-node 20-DOF (5-DOF per node) quadrilateral bending element based on the first-order shear deformation theory for analysis of arbitrary laminated composite plates is presented. Its bending part is based on the element AC-MQ4, a recent-developed high-performance Mindlin-Reissner plate element formulated by QAC method and the generalized conforming condition method; and its in-plane displacement fields are interpolated by bilinear shape functions in isoparametric coordinates. Furthermore, the hybrid post-processing procedure, which was firstly proposed by the authors, is employed again to improve the stress solutions, especially for the transverse shear stresses. The resulting element, denoted as AC-MQ4-LC, exhibits excellent performance in all linear static and dynamic numerical examples. It demonstrates again that the QAC method, the generalized conforming condition method, and the hybrid post-processing procedure are efficient tools for developing simple, effective and reliable finite element models.