The shell structures have been so far concerned in terms of behavior and aesthetics of structures to structural and architectural engineers. The development of finite elements for analysis and design of shell structures has been advanced consistently, and these elements can be deviled simply into two groups; Curved element and Flat element.
In this study, the flat shell element to analyse the shell structures was formed by using membrane element and plate bending element. Furthermore, this study is focused on flat shell transition element for efficient analysis of stress concentrated zones partly created according to concentration loads and/or structural configuration.
The stiffness matrix of flat shell transion element was formulated by combining the stiffness matrix of membrane and plate bending transition element.
The overestimation of shear stiffness resulted from the isoparametric formulation was corrected by addition of nonconforming displacement modes and using modified shear strain polynomials for inplane transition element and plate bending element, respectively. And the singularity in element stiffness matrix which is generated when the 2-dimensional elements are applied to 3-dimensional problems was solved by adding fititious nodal rotation stiffness matrix. Thus, efficient results of displacements and stresses are obtained by locally subdividing the initial mesh, where the stress concentration is occurred.
