ABSTRACT
The early application of HT-FEM to plane elasticity was reported by Jirousek and Teodorescu [1]. Their paper dealt with two alternative variational formulations of HT plane elasticity elements, depending upon whether the auxiliary frame function displacement field is assumed along the whole element boundary or is confined only to the inter-element portion. Subsequently, various versions of HT plane elasticity elements were investigated by several researchers [2 - 5]. Additionally, a family of p-method plane elasticity elements was derived based on the HT-FE formulation by Jirousek and Venkatesh [6], and suitable special-purpose Trefftz functions were developed to treat singularity and/or stress concentration problems avoiding a local mesh refinement. Most of the developments in this field can also be found from review papers by Jirousek and Wroblewski [7] and Qin [8].
