Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Mechanics Research Communications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/mechrescom

A non-linear corotational 4-node plane element

Jean-Marc Battini
Department of Mechanics, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology, SE-10044 Stockholm, Sweden

a r t i c l e

i n f o

a b s t r a c t
A non-linear corotational 4-node plane element is presented. The main interested of the approach is that accurate and efcient linear elements can be transformed to non-linear elements with little work and without considering the assumptions used to derive these linear elements. Two numerical examples are presented. 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Article history: Received 14 September 2007 Received in revised form 28 February 2008 Available online 16 March 2008

Keywords: Corotational formulation Plane elements Non-linear analyses

1. Introduction Due to their simplicity and their efciency in large-scale analyses, low-order nite elements are often used in structural mechanics. For this reason, a lot of research has been done in order to develop accurate and efcient 4-node plane elements, see e.g. the paper of Fredriksson and Saabye Ottosen (2004) for a complete review. However, many of the proposed solutions concern only linear formulations. The reason is that these linear elements are by themselves complicated and their transformation to non-linear formulations is not always straightforward (see e.g. Simo and Armero, 1992; Simo et al., 1993). This is particularly the case if the template formulation proposed by Felippa (2006) is used. One simple way, at least for large displacements and small strains problems, to derive non-linear elements is to used the corotational approach. Corotational beams and shells elements have been widely studied, see e.g. the review article of Felippa and Haugen (2005). However, to the authors knowledge, no complete work and no numerical analyses have been done with plane or solid elements. Besides, this method seems particularly interesting in the present context since it transforms linear elements to non-linear ones with very little work, and without considering the theory used to derive these linear elements. The main idea of the corotational approach is to decompose the motion of the element into rigid-body and pure deformational parts, through the use of a reference system which continuously rotates and translates with the element. The deformational response is captured at the level of the local reference frame, whereas the geometric non-linearity induced by the large rigid-body motion, is incorporated in the transformation matrices relating local and global internal force vectors and tangent stiffness matrices. Assuming the pure deformation part to be small, a geometrical linear theory can be used in the local system. The main interest is that for elements with the same number of nodes and degrees of freedom, the transformation matrices are the same. Using this property, different existing high performing geometrical linear elements can be used as local formulations. As mentioned above, this is particularly interesting for 4-node plane elements for which several advanced linear formulations are available in the literature.

E-mail address: jean-marc.battini@mech.kth.se 0093-6413/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.mechrescom.2008.03.002

J.-M. Battini / Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

409

The corotational framework for 4-node plane elements is given in Section 2. Using for the local formulation two accurate linear elements found in the literature, two numerical problems presenting large displacements and small strains are presented in Section 3. The results obtained with the corotational approach are compared to the ones obtained with ANSYS. 2. Corotational formulation 2.1. Element kinematics The element kinematics is dened in Fig. 1. (O, X, Y) is the global coordinate system. ri X i ; Y i and ui U i ; V i denote the global coordinates and global displacements of the node i. The origin of the local coordinate system (C, x, y) is calculated by rc X c ; Y c Xc 1 X 1 X 2 X 3 X 4 4 Yc 1 Y 1 Y 2 Y 3 Y 4 4 1

In the initial conguration, the axes of the local and global coordinate systems are parallel. ro i xi ; yi denes the local coordinates of the node i. The motion of the element from the initial to the deformed conguration is split in two steps. The rst one is a rigid translation and rotation of the undeformed element. The rigid translation is dened by uc , the global displacement of the point C, which is calculated by uc U c ; V c Uc 1 U 1 U 2 U 3 U 4 4 Vc 1 V 1 V 2 V 3 V 4 4 2

The rigid rotation, specied by the angle h, denes the orientation of the local coordinate system in the deformed conguration. The second step is a local deformation with respect to the local frame. This step is dened by the local deformational dis i u i ; v i ; i 1; . . . ; 4 at the nodes. These displacements are calculated as placements u        i xi u cos h sin h X i U i X c U c 3 i yi v sin h cos h Y i V i Y c V c The rigid rotation h is taken such that the square of the Euclidean norm of the nodal local deformational displacements X4 2 2 v 4 u i i1 i is minimized. Introducing Eq. (3) in Eq. (4), taking the variation with respect to h and setting the resulting expression equal to zero, gives P4 1 xi Y i V i Y c V c yi X i U i X c U c tan h Pi4 5 i1 xi X i U i X c U c yi Y i V i Y c V c This equation gives two values for the rotation h, (h and p h). One value corresponds to the minimization of expression (4), the other value to its maximization. One simple way to choose between these values is to calculate the expression (4) with both angles and to take the angle which gives the smallest result. Finally, the local and global displacement vectors are 1 pl u 1 v 2 u 2 v 3 u 3 v 4 u  4 T v pg U 1 V1 U2 V2 U3 V3 U4 V 4 T 6

Fig. 1. Element kinematics.

410

J.-M. Battini / Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

2.2. Transformation matrices The corotational framework is dened by a change of variables between local and global quantities. Several existing linear formulations can be taken for the local stiffness matrix Kl and internal force vector f l consistent with pl . The global tangent stiffness matrix Kg and internal force vector f g consistent with pg can be calculated by equating the virtual work in the two systems, as
T dpT g f g dpl f l

which, introducing the relations dpl Bdpg gives f g BT f l Kg BT Kl B Kh Kh  oBT f l    opg  9

fl

df g Kg dpg

f l Kl pl

Differentiation of Eq. (3) gives        i ydi du cos h sin h dU i dU c dh i dv xdi sin h cos h dV i dV c

 i xi xdi u i yi ydi v

10

The expression of dh can be obtained from Eq. (5) as    4 X cos h sin h dU i dU c 1 x y dh i i 4 P sin h cos h dV i dV c i1 xi xdi yi ydi
i1

11

From Eqs. (10) and (11), and omitting dU see Eq. (8), is expressed as B PET with A yd1 G
4 P i1

and dV c since nite elements are invariant under pure translation, the matrix B, 12

P I AG

xd1 1

yd2

xd2 x1 

yd3 y2

xd3 x2

yd4 y3 

xd4 x3

13 x4 14

y1

y4

xi xdi yi ydi R cos h sin h sin h cos h 15

E diagR; R; R; R

Using Eq. (12), the matrix Kh , see Eq. (9), is dened by Kh dEPT f l EdPT f l After some work, and noting that A G Kh EFT G GT FPET with PT f l n1 F n2 n2 n3 n4 n4 n3 n5 n6 n6 n7 n8 T n8 n7 18 19
T T

16 I, it is obtained 17

n1

n5

3. Numerical examples Two linear elements, Qm6 and Qnew, have been used for the local formulation. The Qm6 element has been introduced by Taylor et al. (1976), whereas the Qnew element has been developed by Fredriksson and Saabye Ottosen (2004). Two problems, presenting large displacements and small strains have been analysed. The results obtained with the present corotational formulation have been compared to the results obtained with ANSYS. The analyses in ANSYS have been performed using the element PLANE182 with KEYOPT(1) = 2. This element is a non-linear formulation of the Qm6 element based on the updated Lagrangian formulation. This element is implemented for large strains, but since the strains in the two test problems remain small, it can be used for the proposed comparison. For each structure, two meshes have been tested: a ne one which gives the converged solutions and a coarse one in order to test the ability of the present corotational formulation in obtaining good results with coarse meshes.

J.-M. Battini / Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

411

3.1. Example 1: angle frame This example is described in Fig. 2. The structure is clamped at one end (all displacements zero) and loaded by a uniformly distributed horizontal force F at the other end. The ne mesh consists of 304 square elements whereas the coarse one consists of 19 distorted elements. The results obtained using 20 steps and the tolerance parameter 105 for the nodal forces

Fig. 2. Example 1: angle frame.

4.5 4 Qnew coarse mesh 3.5 Qm6 coarse mesh 3 ANSYS coarse mesh 2.5 fine mesh 2 1.5 1 0.5 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Load F / 10000

Horizontal displacement of point A

Fig. 3. Example 1: loaddisplacement diagram.

Table 1 Example 1 total number of NewtonRaphson iterations ANSYS Coarse mesh Fine mesh 66 72 Qm6 60 60 Qnew 60 60

412

J.-M. Battini / Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

Fig. 4. Example 2: thin ring.

11 10 9 8 7

Load F / 1000

6 Qnew coarse mesh 5 Qm6 coarse mesh 4 ANSYS coarse mesh 3 fine mesh 2 1 0 0 5 10 15 20 25 30

Vertical displacement of point A

Fig. 5. Example 2: loaddisplacement diagram.

(command CNVTOL in ANSYS) are shown in Fig. 3. With the ne mesh, the three elements give exactly the same results. With the coarse mesh, ANSYS and Qm6 give almost the same results whereas Qnew gives slightly better results. The total number of NewtonRaphson iterations are given in Table 1. It can be observed that the convergence rate of the corotational approach is slightly better than the one in ANSYS. 3.2. Example 2: thin ring A half ring, clamped at both ends is loaded at its top by a concentrated force 2F . Due to the symmetry, only half of the structure is modelled, with 80 4 320 elements and 20 1 20 elements, see Fig. 4. The results are shown in Fig. 5. The three elements give the same results, both with the coarse and ne meshes. It can also be noted that the results obtained with the coarse mesh are very closed to the ones obtained with the ne mesh. 4. Conclusion This paper has described a corotational framework for 4-node plane elements. The linear elements Qm6 and Qnew, found in the literature, has been used as local formulations. Two numerical applications have shown that the proposed formulation

J.-M. Battini / Mechanics Research Communications 35 (2008) 408413

413

can be used to analyse plane problems presenting large displacements and small strains. Very good numerical results have been obtained, both with ne and coarse meshes, and also with distorted elements. The main interest of the proposed approach is that, using the described corotational framework, efcient linear elements are automatically transformed to nonlinear formulations. References
Felippa, C., 2006. Supernatural QUAD4: A template formulation. Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Eng. 195, 53165342. Felippa, C., Haugen, B., 2005. A unied formulation of small-strain corotational nite elements: I. Theory. Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Eng. 194, 22852335. Fredriksson, M., Saabye Ottosen, N., 2004. Fast and accurate 4-node quadrilateral. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Eng. 61, 18091834. Simo, J., Armero, F., 1992. Geometrically non-linear enhanced strain mixed methods and the method of incompatible modes. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Eng. 33, 14131449. Simo, J., Armero, F., Taylor, R., 1993. Improved versions of assumed enhanced strain tri-linear elements for 3d nite deformation problems. Comput. Meth. Appl. Mech. Eng. 110, 359386. Taylor, R., Beresford, P., Wilson, E., 1976. A non-conforming element for stress analysis. Int. J. Numer. Meth. Eng. 10, 12111219.