The MITC3+ shell element and its performance

In this paper, we present an effective new 3-node triangular shell finite element, called the MITC3+ element. The new shell element is based on the concepts earlier published for the MITC3 shell element (Lee and Bathe, 2004) [1] but is enriched by a cubic bubble function for the rotations. A new assumed transverse shear strain field is developed for the element. The shell element passes the three basic tests (the isotropy, patch and zero energy mode tests) and shows excellent convergence behavior in basic and encompassing convergence tests.