Common Properties: Plates

Description

Properties commonly found in plate property sets.

Properties

Thickness

Plate thickness.

Units are Length (e.g., m, in).

Membrane Thickness

Plate thickness used for computation of the membrane stiffness.

Units are Length (e.g., m, in).

Bending Thickness

Plate thickness used for computation of the bending stiffness in isotropic, orthotropic and anisotropic shell elements.

Units are Length (e.g., m, in).

Equivalent Thickness

Total thickness of laminate properties based on the ply layup, or equivalent thickness of user-defined shell elements (used for calculating mass and for calculating the area to determine a force for pressure-based edge attributes).

Units are Length (e.g., m, in).

Reduced Integration (Quad8, Quad9)

If set, the number of integration points used to integrate the quadratic elements will be reduced from 3×3, for complete integration, to 2×2, for reduced integration.

Add Bubble Function (Quad4)

If set, incompatible displacement modes (also called bubble modes) are introduced into the element, improving its in-plane bending behaviour for 2D plane-stress, 2D plane-strain and axisymmetric element solution types.

If not set, the standard element formulation is used.

For plastic materials, the bubble function is always excluded.

See Also