A quadrilateral shell element incorporating thickness‐stretch for nearly incompressible hyperelasticity

Summary The authors proposed a quadrilateral shell element enriched with degrees of freedom to represent thickness‐stretch. The quadrilateral shell element can be utilized to consider large deformations for nearly incompressible materials, and its performance is demonstrated in small and large deformation analyses of hyperelastic materials in this study. Formulation of the proposed shell element is based on extension of the MITC4 shell element. A displacement variation in the thickness direction is introduced to evaluate the change in thickness. In the proposed approach, the thickness direction is defined using the director vectors at each midsurface node. The thickness‐stretch is approximated by the movements of additional nodes, which are placed along the thickness direction from the bottom to the top surface. The transverse normal strain is calculated using these additional nodes without assuming the plane stress condition; hence, a three‐dimensional constitutive equation can be employed without any modification. In this work, the authors apply an assumed strain technique to the special shell element to alleviate volumetric locking for nearly incompressible materials. Several numerical examples are presented to examine the effectiveness of the proposed element.