Membrane Triangles with Drilling Degrees of Freedom

Abstract

An accurate triangular plane element with drilling degrees of freedom is shown in this paper. This element can be successfully used for solving linear and nonlinear problems. The main advantage of this element is that the stiffness matrix is obtained from pure deformations – elongations of the edges. This aproach is very suitable for nonlinear analysis, where the unbalanced forces can be obtained directly from elongations of edges.