fenics-shells: a UFL-based library for simulating thin structures

Shell, plate and beam (thin) structures are widely used in civil, mechanical and aeronautical engineering because they are capable of carrying high loads with a minimal amount of structural mass. Because the out-of-plane dimension is usually much smaller than the two in-plane dimensions, it is possible to asymptotically reduce the full 3D equations of elasticity to a whole variety of equivalent 2D models posed on a manifold embedded in 3D space. This reduction results in massively reduced computational expense and remains a necessity for practical large-scale computation of structures of real engineering interest such as the fuselage of an aircraft.

The numerical solution of such mathematical models is a challenging task, especially for very thin shells when shear and membrane locking effects require special attention. As originally noted by [Hale and Baiz, 2013], the high-level form language UFL provides an excellent framework for writing extensible, reusable and pedagogical numerical models of thin structures. To our knowledge fenics-shells represents the first unified open-source implementation of a wide range of thin structural models, including Reissner-Mindlin, Kirchhoff-Love, Von Karman and hierarchical (higher-order) plates, and Madare-Naghdi and Madare-Koiter shell models.

Because of the broad scope of fenics-shells, in this talk we will focus on how to cure numerical locking by applying the Mixed Interpolation of Tensorial Components (MITC) approach of [Dvorkin and Bathe, 1986] and [Lee and Bathe, 2010] to a shell with an initially flat reference configuration. The MITC approach consists of an element-by-element interpolation of the degrees of freedom of the rotations onto the degrees of freedom of a reduced rotation space, the latter typically constructed using H(curl) conforming finite elements such as the rotated Raviart-Thomas-Nédélec elements. Then, the bilinear form is constructed on the underlying H(curl) space. Because of the interpolation operator, the original problem is expressed in terms of the degrees of freedom for the rotations only. Within DOLFIN we have implemented this projection operation using two UFL forms within a custom assembler compiled just-in-time using Instant. We show numerical convergence studies that match the apriori bounds available in the literature.

E. N. Dvorkin and K.-J. Bathe, “A continuum mechanics based four-node shell element for general non-linear analysis,” Engineering Computations, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 77–88, 1984. P. S. Lee and K. J. Bathe, “The quadratic MITC plate and MITC shell elements in plate bending,” Advances in Engineering Software, vol. 41, no. 5, pp. 712–728, 2010. J. S. Hale and P. M. Baiz, “Towards effective shell modelling with the FEniCS project” presented at the FEniCS Conference 2013, Jesus College, Cambridge, 19-Mar-2013.