A cubic quadrilateral spline element with concave shapes

Basic requirement for applying isoparametric element is that the element has to be convex and no violent distortion is allowed. In this paper, a cubic quadrilateral spline element with 12 nodes has been developed using the triangular area coordinates and the B-net method, which can exactly model the cubic field for quadrilateral element with both convex and concave shapes. Neither mapping nor coordinate transformation is required and the spline element can obtain high accuracy solutions and insensitive to mesh distortions.