Eight-Node Solid Element for Thick Shell Simulations

An eight-node hexahedral solid element is incorporated into LS-DYNA to simulate thick shell structure. The element formulations are derived in a corotational coordinate system and the strain operator is calculated with a Taylor series expansion about the center of the element. Special treatments are made on the dilatational strain component and shear strain components to eliminate the volumetric and shear locking. The use of consistent tangential stiffness and geometric stiffness greatly improves the convergence rate in implicit analysis.