Assessment of an Assumed Strain-based Quadrilateral Membrane Element

This paper describes the development of a simple quadrilateral strain-based element for plane stress and strain problems. This element has five nodes, four located at its corners and one at the center. Each of the four corner nodes had two essential external degrees of freedom (u, v), while the center node had three degrees of freedom (u, v, ɵ); the static condensation method was used for the internal node. This element was used for both linear and dynamic analysis. Its performance was assessed using a variety of membrane and axisymmetric analysis problems. The obtained results demonstrated the good performance and accuracy of the proposed element.