A simple and effective method based on strain projections to alleviate locking in isogeometric solid shells
In this work, we focus on the family of shell formulations referred to as “solid shells”, where the simulation of shell-type structures is performed by means of a mesh of 3D solid elements, with typically only one element through the thickness. We propose a novel approach for alleviating shear and membrane locking phenomena, which typically appear in thin structures, based on the projection of strains onto discontinuous coarser polynomial spaces defined at element level. In particular, we present and investigate two different formulations based on this approach.