The Reissner-Mindlin plate model describes the bending of a thin plate subject to transverse loading in terms of the transverse displacement of the midplane and the rotation of fibers normal to the midplane. A unified approach to error analysis is presented and several examples are given to show the effectiveness of this approach. Included are two new families of locking-free finite elements.
Computational results show the sharpness of the estimates obtained.
Time permitting, the talk will include a historical perspective of the main ideas behind the derivation of locking-free methods.