Thick Shell Element Results

Thick shell element results

Thick shells in Ansys LS-DYNA look like bricks, but the default formulation for thick shells is effectively an extruded thin shell element. They use very similar integration schemes and, like thin shells, do not integrate through thickness (Z') stress. In this case, through thickness strain is computed from volume conservation.

Also available are fully integrated formulations (ELFORM=3 onwards) that are layered brick elements which do compute through thickness stresses.