Membrane elements have been analyzed numerically to develop a four-noded plate element with balanced accuracy between bending behavior and membrane behavior. A membrane element with drilling DOFs based on the penalty formulation has been selected from the analysis and its performance has been improved through uniform reduced integration and stabilization. Integration order of the membrane strain energy has been decreased by one for the reduction of membrane locking and that of the penalty term has been increased by one for the stabilization. For the approximation of bending behavior, the mindlin element of mixed interpolated tensorial components has been utilized. It has been shown through numerical experiments element was not worse than the established membrane elements for 2-D membrane problem and it was better than the elements for 3-D shell problems. Further research would be required for the mathematical justification of the proposed method.
