A novel finite volume based formulation for the elasto-plastic analysis of plates

• This work presents a novel approach based on the finite volume method for the elasto-plastic bending analysis of plates.
• The shear deformation is considered in the formulation which shows no shear locking deficiency.
• The formulation can deal with the moderately thick and very thin plates with the same numerical solution algorithms.

In this paper, a novel finite volume formulation for the elasto-plastic analysis of Mindlin–Reissner plates is proposed. A layered approach is adopted which enables to monitor the evolution of the through-thickness plasticity. For the solution of the discretized equations, two different incremental solution algorithms are implemented. The proposed method is validated through a series of benchmark comparisons. It is observed that the results obtained are in good agreement with the reference results. It is also demonstrated that the proposed finite volume based formulation has good capabilities in dealing with the plastic modeling of very thin to moderately thick plates.