An improved 3-D brick Cosserat point element for irregular shaped elements (Q1015706)

A generalized functional form for the energy strain function of inhomogeneous deformations is proposed for irregular shape elements. The coefficients in the strain energy function are determined by matching exact pure bending solutions for three parallelepipeds with axes oriented along three orthogonal basis vectors. A generalization is proposed which ensures that this strain energy function remains positive definite for general irregular shaped elements. A number of numerical experiments are performed, and the results are compared with analytical solutions.