A novel hybrid isogeometric element based on two-field Hellinger-Reissner principle to alleviate different types of locking

Abstract: In the present work, a novel class of hybrid elements is proposed to alleviate the locking anomaly in non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS)-based isogeometric analysis (IGA) using a two-field Hellinger-Reissner variational principle. The proposed hybrid elements are derived by adopting the independent interpolation schemes for displacement and stress field. The key highlight of the present study is the choice and evaluation of higher-order terms for the stress interpolation function to provide a locking-free solution. Furthermore, the present study demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed elements with the treatment of several two-dimensional linear-elastic benchmark problems alongside the conventional single-field IGA, Lagrangian-based finite element analysis (FEA), and hybrid FEA formulation. It is shown that the proposed class of hybrid elements performs effectively for analyzing the nearly incompressible problem domains that are severely affected by volumetric locking along with the thin plate and shell problems where the shear and membrane locking is dominant. A better coarse mesh accuracy of the proposed method in comparison with the conventional formulation is demonstrated through various numerical examples. Moreover, the formulation is not restricted to the locking-dominated problem domains but can also be implemented to solve the problems of general form without any special treatment. Thus, the proposed method is robust, most efficient, and highly effective against different types of locking.