A shell superelement for mechanical analysis of cylindrical structures

This paper aims at developing a new cylindrical shell element, called shell superelement. The element is defined based on the classical shell theory, and it consists of eight nodes each with six degree-of-freedoms (dofs). In this element, the trigonometric shape functions are incorporated along the angular direction of element while polynomials were used in other two directions. Therefore, there is no need for meshing a shell structure with cylindrical geometry through the angular direction. This property helps an engineer to deal with complicated analyses on cylindrical shell structures with less number of dofs. At the end, the defined element is used in the stress analysis of two different classical shell problems and the results are compared with the ones reported in the literature, and obtained by means of shell elements in a commercial software package.