Nonlinear analysis of fiber-reinforced folded shells enriched by nano-additives using a coupled FEM-IGA formulation

This paper focuses on the analysis of the nonlinear static behavior of fiber-reinforced folded shell panels enriched by nano additives. The employed nanocomposites are carbon nanotubes and graphene nanoplatelets. In this paper, a coupled formulation is developed which combines the isogeometric analysis (IGA) and the finite element method (FEM) along two directions on the shell surface. Using the mentioned coupled formulation, the benefits of IGA and FEM are employed in a combined formulation so that the FEM in the folding direction leads to avoid the multi-patch discretization and the IGA along the other direction reduces the required number of degrees of freedom to obtain accurate results. The present formulation is validated (i) by solving some problems available in the literature and (ii) by comparing to the numerical solutions from the commercial ABAQUS FEM code. The obtained results in the framework of an extensive parametric study demonstrate the applicability of the method.