h-adaptive method for elasto-plastic shell problems

In order to perform effective and reliable computations for thin walled problems in finite plasticity, a central goal is to discretize a structure by minimizing the degrees of freedom while controlling the numerical error. In this paper an h-adaptive procedure for shell problems in finite plasticity is presented. An error indicator for finite plasticity is derived on the basis of the Superconvergent Patch Recovery (SPR) procedure and combined with components of shell element analysis, mesh generation and inter-mesh projection technique. Numerical examples are given illustrating the effectiveness of the combined approach.