A quadratic plane triangular element immune to quadratic mesh distortions under quadratic displacement fields

A quadratic plane triangular element is developed extending the concepts of US-QUAD8 element. The element belongs to the broad class of Petrov–Galerkin formulation which is characterized by the choice of test and trial functions from different spaces. The performance of the proposed element has been studied for typical static and free vibration problems. The element exhibits a high degree of tolerance to mesh distortions as compared to the classical isoparametric quadratic triangular element. For undistorted meshes, however, the performance is similar to that of the classical element.