A new prismatic solid-shell element ‘SHB6’: Assumed-strain formulation and evaluation on benchmark problems

In this paper, the formulation of a new six-node solid–shell element denoted (SHB6) is proposed. This prismatic element is based on a purely three-dimensional approach, and hence has displacements as the only degrees of freedom. A reduced integration scheme is adopted consisting of one-point in-plane quadrature and an arbitrary number of integration points, with a minimum number of two, distributed along the ‘thickness’ direction.