Search

This paper focuses on the employment of analysis-suitable T-spline surfaces of arbitrary degree for performing structural analysis of fully nonlinear thin shells. Our aim is to bring closer a seamless and flexible integration of design and analysis for shell structures. The local refinement capability of T-splines together with the Kirchhoff–Love shell discretization, which does not use rotational degrees of freedom, leads to a highly efficient and accurate formulation. Trimmed NURBS surfaces, which are ubiquitous in CAD programs, cannot be directly applied in analysis, however, T-splines can reparameterize these surfaces leading to analysis-suitable untrimmed T-spline representations. We consider various classical nonlinear benchmark problems where the cylindrical and spherical geometries are exactly represented and point loads are accurately captured through local h -refinement. Taking advantage of the higher inter-element continuity of T-splines, smooth stress resultants are plotted without using projection methods. Finally, we construct various trimmed NURBS surfaces with Rhino, an industrial and general-purpose CAD program, convert them to T-spline surfaces, and directly use them in analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the use of analysis-suitable T-splines of arbitrary degree in combination with isogeometric collocation methods for the solution of second- and fourth-order boundary-value problems. In fact, analysis-suitable T-splines appear to be a particularly efficient locally refinable basis for isogeometric collocation, able to conserve the cost of only one point evaluation per degree of freedom typical of standard NURBS-based isogeometric collocation. Furthermore, T-splines allow to easily create highly non-uniform meshes without introducing elements with high aspect ratios; this makes it possible to avoid the numerical instabilities that may arise in the case of problems characterized by reduced regularity when Neumann boundary conditions are imposed in strong form and elements with high aspect ratio are used. The local refinement properties of T-splines can be also successfully exploited to approximate problems where point loads are applied. Finally, several numerical tests are herein presented in order to confirm all the above-mentioned features, as well as the good overall convergence properties of the combination of isogeometric collocation and analysis-suitable T-splines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NURBS-based discretizations of the Galerkin method suffer from membrane locking when applied to primal formulations of curved thin-walled structures. We consider linear plane curved Kirchhoff rods as a model problem to study how to remove membrane locking from NURBS-based discretizations. In this work, we propose continuous-assumed-strain (CAS) elements, an assumed strain treatment that removes membrane locking from quadratic NURBS for an ample range of slenderness ratios. CAS elements take advantage of the C 1 inter-element continuity of the displacement vector given by quadratic NURBS to interpolate the membrane strain using linear Lagrange polynomials while preserving the C 0 inter-element continuity of the membrane strain. To the authors' knowledge, CAS elements are the first NURBS-based element type able to remove membrane locking for a broad range of slenderness ratios that combines the following distinctive characteristics: (1) No additional degrees of freedom are added, (2) No additional systems of algebraic equations need to be solved, and (3) The nonzero pattern of the stiffness matrix is preserved. Since the only additional computations required by the proposed element type are to evaluate the derivatives of the basis functions and the unit tangent vector at the knots, the proposed scheme barely increases the computational cost with respect to the locking-prone NURBS-based discretization of the primal formulation. The benchmark problems show that the convergence of CAS elements is independent of the slenderness ratio up to 1 0 4 while the convergence of quadratic NURBS elements with full and reduced integration, local B ̄ elements, and local ANS elements depends heavily on the slenderness ratio and the error can even increase as the mesh is refined. The numerical examples also show how CAS elements remove the spurious oscillations in stress resultants caused by membrane locking while quadratic NURBS elements with full and reduced integration, local B ̄ elements, and local ANS elements suffer from large-amplitude spurious oscillations in stress resultants. In short, CAS elements are an accurate, robust, and computationally efficient numerical scheme to overcome membrane locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis-suitable T-splines (ASTS) including both extraordinary points and T-junctions are used to solve Kirchhoff–Love shell problems. Extraordinary points are required to represent surfaces with arbitrary topological genus. T-junctions enable local refinement of regions where increased resolution is needed. The benefits of using ASTS to define shell geometries are at least two-fold: (1) The manual and time-consuming task of building a new mesh from scratch using the CAD geometry as an input is avoided and (2) C 1 or higher inter-element continuity enables the discretization of shell formulations in primal form defined by fourth-order partial differential equations. A complete and state-of-the-art description of the development of ASTS, including extraordinary points and T-junctions, is presented. In particular, we improve the construction of C 1 -continuous non-negative spline basis functions near extraordinary points to obtain optimal convergence rates with respect to the square root of the number of degrees of freedom when solving linear elliptic problems. The applicability of the proposed technology to shell analysis is exemplified by performing geometrically nonlinear Kirchhoff–Love shell simulations of a pinched hemisphere, an oil sump of a car, a pipe junction, and a B-pillar of a car with 15 holes. Building ASTS for these examples involves using T-junctions and extraordinary points with valences 3, 5, and 6, which often suffice for the design of free-form surfaces. Our analysis results are compared with data from the literature using either a seven-parameter shell formulation or Kirchhoff–Love shells. We have also imported both finite element meshes and ASTS meshes into the commercial software LS-DYNA, used Reissner–Mindlin shells, and compared the result with our Kirchhoff–Love shell results. Excellent agreement is found in all cases. The complexity of the shell geometries considered in this paper shows that ASTS are applicable to real-world industrial problems. • Detailed description of bi-cubic non-negative smooth analysis-suitable T-splines. • Improved treatment of C 1 -continuous extraordinary points. • Optimal convergence rates with respect to n d o f . • Geometries of increasing complexity, including an automotive B-pillar. • Comparisons with the literature and the commercial software LS-DYNA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]