An adaptive hybrid stress transition quadrilateral finite element method for linear elasticity

Abstract: In this paper, we discuss an adaptive hybrid stress finite element method on quadrilateral meshes for linear elasticity problems. To deal with hanging nodes arising in the adaptive mesh refinement, we propose new transition types of hybrid stress quadrilateral elements with 5 to 7 nodes. In particular, we derive a priori error estimation for the 5-node transition hybrid stress element to show that it is free from Poisson-locking, in the sense that the error bound in the a priori estimate is independent of the Lame constant $\lambda$. We introduce, for quadrilateral meshes, refinement/coarsening algorithms, which do not require storing the refinement tree explicitly, and give an adaptive algorithm. Finally we provide some numerical results.