An ''equilibrium'' finite element model for elastic-plastic plates (Q1088450)

Finite elements for elastic-plastic analysis of bending plates are formulated by suitable modelling stress function and plastic multiplier distributions. The procedures so developed are consistent with an extremum theorem which allows to solve the incremental elastic-plastic problem by minimizing a functional subject to linear constraint relations. The proposed finite element model permits to cast the variational approach into a quadratic programming problem linearly constrained, which would be an efficient numerical tool.