This paper on "Adaptive Methods for the Nonlinear FE Analysis of Shell Structures" was presented at the NAFEMS World Congress on Design, Simulation & Optimisation: Reliability & Applicability of Computational Methods - 9-11 April 1997, Stuttgart, Germany.

Abstract

Starting with the equilibrium equations for shells and their finite element discretization, residual and postprocessing based a-posteriori error estimators are introduced. In addition to the classical energy norm estimates, an introduction into the lately developed mesh adaptation methods for arbitrary local quantities is also given.
In the second part error estimation and mesh adaptation techniques are extended to the geometrically nonlinear regime. Furthermore for the verification of complex structural behavior a procedure for adaptive computation of singular points like bifurcation and limit points is described.