A weak form quadrature element formulation for geometrically exact thin shell analysis

The present paper addresses a weak form quadrature element formulation for the geometrically exact thin shell model in which the Kirchhoff-Love hypothesis is adopted. The displacement derivative continuity conditions are enforced by the reconstruction of rotation variables at the edges of elements. By the utilization of rotation quaternions, a total Lagrange updating scheme is implemented for edge constraint director rotations. Several numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed formulation and the significant reduction in the number of degrees of freedom in geometrically nonlinear thin shell analysis with large displacements and rotations.