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Shell Thicknesses

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Each shell must have a thickness assigned to it.  Based on the ratio of thickness to span length, you may choose to use the thin or thick plate bending formulation.

 

The thick plate formulation is generally recommended over the thin plate formulation because it applies equally well to both thick and thin plates.  The program therefore uses the thick plate formulation by default.  If thickness to span ratio is less than 1/20 and elements are rectangular, you may use the thin plate formulation.  The thickness should be compared to the support distances, not to the sizes of individual plate elements.

 

It is important to point out that out-of-plane shear forces exist in thin plates even though shear deformations are not considered.  You may draw an analogy between a plate and a beam.  A thin plate is analogous to a Euler-Bernoulli beam while a thick plate is analogous to a Timoshenko beam.  We consider shear deformation for the Timoshenko beam but not for the Euler-Bernoulli beam, while shear forces exist in both the Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beams.

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