A novel finite volume based formulation for the elasto-plastic analysis of plates

In this paper, a novel finite volume formulation for the elasto-plastic analysis of Mindlin-Reissner plates is proposed. A layered approach is adopted which enables to monitor the evolution of the through-thickness plasticity. For the solution of the discretized equations, two different incremental solution algorithms are implemented. The proposed method is validated through a series of benchmark comparisons. It is observed that the results obtained are in good agreement with the reference results. It is also demonstrated that the proposed finite volume based formulation has good capabilities in dealing with the plastic modeling of very thin to moderately thick plates. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.