Vanquishing volumetric locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of nearly-incompressible linear elasticity: CAS elements

Abstract: Quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of the Galerkin method suffer from volumetric locking when applied to nearly-incompressible linear elasticity. Volumetric locking causes not only smaller displacements than expected, but also large-amplitude spurious oscillations of normal stresses. Continuous-assumed-strain (CAS) elements have been recently introduced to remove membrane locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of linear plane curved Kirchhoff rods (Casquero et al., CMAME, 2022). In this work, we propose two generalizations of CAS elements (named CAS1 and CAS2 elements) to overcome volumetric locking in quadratic NURBS-based discretizations of nearly-incompressible linear elasticity. CAS1 elements linearly interpolate the strains at the knots in each direction for the term in the variational form involving the first Lam\'e parameter while CAS2 elements linearly interpolate the dilatational strains at the knots in each direction. For both element types, a displacement vector with C1 continuity across element boundaries results in assumed strains with C0 continuity across element boundaries. In addition, the implementation of the two locking treatments proposed in this work does not require any additional global or element matrix operations such as matrix inversions or matrix multiplications. The locking treatments are applied at the element level and the nonzero pattern of the global stiffness matrix is preserved. The numerical examples solved in this work show that CAS1 and CAS2 elements, using either two or three Gauss-Legrendre quadrature points per direction, are effective locking treatments since they not only result in more accurate displacements for coarse meshes, but also remove the spurious oscillations of normal stresses.