The virtual work of stresses developed in Part I for the helicoidal shell model and
then reduced to the material surface is taken as one term of a variational principle
stated on a two-dimensional domain. The other terms related to the external loads
and to the boundary constraints are added here and include a weak-form treatment
of the constraints, which becomes necessary in the context of helicoidal modeling. All
terms are cast in incremental form and yield a linearized variational principle of the
virtual work type for two-dimensional continua, endowed with an internal constraint
conjugate to an extra stress field that is able to control the drilling degree of
freedom.
The virtual functional and the virtual tangent functional are approximated by the
finite element method, using helicoidal interpolation for the kinematic field (which
ensures objectivity and path independence) and a uniform representation for the
extra stress field. A low-order four-node shell element is obtained, with 6 degrees of
freedom per node and a unique stress-vector discrete unknown per element. Several
test cases demonstrate the performance of the element and its outstanding
locking-free behavior.
Keywords
nonlinear shell elements, helicoidal multiplicative
interpolation, micropolar shell mechanics and drilling
degrees of freedom, constraints in weak form, finite
rotations and rototranslations, dual tensor algebra