An efficient implementation of stress resultant plasticity in analysis of Reissner‐Mindlin plates

An efficient solution procedure for elasto‐plastic analysis of Reissner‐Mindlin plates has been proposed in this work. The main ingredients which render efficiency are: what appears to be an optimally tuned four‐node plate element with assumed shear strains and incompatible bending modes; an elasto‐plastic constitutive model given directly in terms of stress resultants; and efficient computation of plastic flow which simplifies to a solution of a single scalar equation and remaining state update computation. The performance of the element has been proved very satisfying in both elastic singularity‐dominated and elasto‐plastic problems.