A VARIATIONAL APPROACH TO GEOMETRICALLY NONLINEAR-ANALYSIS OF ASYMMETRICALLY LOADED ROTATIONAL SHELLS .2. FINITE-ELEMENT APPLICATION

The general and unified geometrically nonlinear theory developed in Part I is implemented using the finite element method (FEM). The axisymmetric shell element used has been vigorously tested and reported for linear static, dynamic and buckling analysis in previous works. The current effort deploys the above element and the well-known Fourier analysis to form the individual strain energy terms. This enables the generation of the geometric matrix incrementally and thus brings into influence the effect of geometric nonlinearity. Emphasis in Part II is on the implementation of the theory and clarification of the evolved algorithm. A number of large deflection examples have been included for comparison, with the results being deemed as most satisfactory.