Improved stresses for the 4-node tetrahedral element

The objective in this paper is to present the method for the calculation of improved stresses published by Payen and Bathe in [1] for the 4-node three-dimensional tetrahedral element. This element is widely used in engineering practice to obtain, in general, only “guiding” results in the analysis of solids because the element is known to be poor in stress predictions. We show in this paper the potential of this novel approach to significantly enhance the stress predictions with the 4-node tetrahedral element at a relatively low computational cost.