A Posteriori Error Estimation and H-Adaptive Refinement Techniques for Transient Dynamic Analysis of Stiffened Plate/Shell panels

This paper presents a posteriori error estimation and h-adaptive refinement techniques for transient dynamic analysis of stiffened plates/shells using the finite element method (FEM). We furnish the formulation of stiffness and mass matrices for finite element (FE) models, QL9S2 and QUAD4S2 for dynamic analysis of plates/shells with arbitrarily-located concentric/eccentric stiffeners. Procedures for computing a posteriori errors for spatial and temporal errors have been presented for transient dynamic problems. An h-adaptive refinement strategy for stiffened plate/shell panels by employing QL9S2 and QUAD4S2 FE models has been discussed. An adaptive time stepping scheme, which is to be used with the time errors for quality control of the time steps, has also been presented. Numerical studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the error estimators and the adaptive mesh refinement and time stepping algorithm. The spatial error estimator for transient dynamic analysis is found to exhibit monotonic convergence at all time steps. The temporal error estimator for transient dynamic analysis in association with the adaptive time stepping is able to compute more accurate and reliable time steps to keep the time errors within the specified tolerance limits.