ABSTRACT
Shell structures have been widely used in engineering practice. So developing a reliable and efficient solution procedure is important in shell structural analysis, especially for thin shell problems. Lee and Bathe (2004) divided thin shell problems into three categories: membrane-dominated, bending-dominated, and mixed shell problems. Shear and membrane locking phenomena are serious in displacement-based thin shell finite elements for bending-dominated shell structures. These locking phenomena are due to overestimating the contribution of the membrane strain and shear strain in element strain energy, thus overestimating the element membrane and shear stiffness (Huang, 1987).
