A consistent co‐rotational formulation for shells using the constant stress/constant moment triangle

The simplest facet‐shell formulation involves the combination of the constant‐strain membrane triangle with a constant‐curvature bending triangle. The paper describes a technique whereby this facet‐formulation is extended to handle geometric non‐linearity by means of a co‐rotational procedure. Emphasis is placed on the derivation of a technique that is increment‐independent with both the internal force vector and tangent stiffness matrix being derived from the 'total strain measures' in a 'consistent manner'. Numerical examples are presented which demonstrate an excellent numerical performance.