A Study on Formulation of Strain-Based Triangular Elements

This paper presents formulation of triangular elements based on strain approach. Various formulations of the strain-based elements can be seen in the literature. However, most of them do not clearly describe selection of the suitable strain fields for the elements. Therefore, in this work, some guidance for the formulation of strain-based elements are provided based on simulation results that are obtained by using several polynomial functions from Pascal’s triangle. It is seen that higher order terms in the strain functions do not always guarantee better performance for the case considered in this work.