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Within the framework of the displacement-based virtual element method (VEM), namely, for plane elasticity, an important topic is the development of optimal techniques for the evaluation of the stress field. In fact, in the classical VEM formulation, the same projection operator used to approximate the strain field (and then evaluate the stiffness matrix) is employed to recover, via constitutive law, the stress field. Considering a first-order formulation, strains are locally mapped onto constant functions, and stresses are piecewise constant. However, the virtual displacements might engender more complex strain fields for polygons, which are not triangles. This leads to an undesirable loss of information with respect to the underlying virtual stress field. The recovery by compatibility in patches, originally proposed for finite element schemes, is here extended to VEM, aiming at mitigating such an effect. Stresses are recovered by minimizing the complementary energy of patches of elements over an assumed set of equilibrated stress modes. The procedure is simple, efficient, and can be readily implemented in existing codes. Numerical tests confirm the good performance of the proposed technique in terms of accuracy and indicate an increase of convergence rate with respect to the classical approach in many cases.

In this paper, an enhanced Virtual Element Method (VEM) formulation is proposed for plane elasticity. It is based on the improvement of the strain representation within the element, without altering the degree of the displacement interpolating functions on the element boundary. The idea is to fully exploit polygonal elements with a high number of sides, a peculiar VEM feature, characterized by many displacement degrees of freedom on the element boundary, even if a low interpolation order is assumed over each side. The proposed approach is framed within a generalization of the classic VEM formulation, obtained by introducing an energy norm in the projection operator definition. Although such generalization may mainly appear to have a formal value, it allows to effectively point out the mechanical meaning of the quantities involved in the projection operator definition and to drive the selection of the enhanced representations. Various enhancements are proposed and tested through several numerical examples. Numerical results successfully show the capability of the enhanced VEM formulation to (i) considerably increase accuracy (with respect to standard VEM) while keeping the optimal convergence rate, (ii) bypass the need of stabilization terms in many practical cases, (iii) obtain natural serendipity elements in many practical cases, and (vi) effectively treat also nearly incompressible materials., 27 pages, 6 figures

In this paper, a first-order virtual element method for Reissner–Mindlin plates is presented. A standard displacement-based variational formulation is employed, assuming transverse displacement and rotations as independent variables. In the framework of the first-order virtual element, a piecewise linear approximation is assumed for both displacement and rotations on the boundary of the element. The consistent term of the stiffness matrix is determined assuming uncoupled polynomial approximations for the generalized strains, with different polynomial degrees for bending and shear parts. In order to mitigate shear locking in the thin-plate limit while keeping the element formulation as simple as possible, a selective scheme for the stabilization term of the stiffness matrix is introduced, to indirectly enrich the approximation of the transverse displacement with respect to that of the rotations. Element performance is tested on various numerical examples involving both thin and thick plates and different polygonal meshes.

A dual hybrid Virtual Element scheme for plane linear elastic problems is presented and analysed. In particular, stability and convergence results have been established. The method, which is first order convergent, has been numerically tested on two benchmarks with closed form solution, and on a typical microelectromechanical system. The numerical outcomes have proved that the dual hybrid scheme represents a valid alternative to the more classical low-order displacement-based Virtual Element Method.

In the framework of 2D elasticity problems, a family of Virtual Element schemes based on the Hellinger–Reissner variational principle is presented. A convergence and stability analysis is rigorously developed. Numerical tests confirming the theoretical predictions are performed.

The numerical approximation of 2D elasticity problems is considered, in the framework of the small strain theory and in connection with the mixed Hellinger–Reissner variational formulation. A low-order Virtual Element Method (VEM) with a priori symmetric stresses is proposed. Several numerical tests are provided, along with a rigorous stability and convergence analysis.