Performance of the MITC3+ and MITC4+ shell elements in widely-used benchmark problems

Recently, new 3-node and 4-node MITC shell elements, the MITC3+ and MITC4+ elements, have been proposed. The two shell elements were tested through theoretically well-established convergence studies. In this paper we continue to investigate the performance of the MITC3+ and MITC4+ shell elements in relatively simple but widely adopted benchmark problems. To perform these tests as usually done, the predictive capability of the elements is assessed through point-wise convergence of displacements at specific locations of shell structures. The results obtained using the MITC3+ and MITC4+ shell elements are compared with those found for some other shell elements.