A general isogeometric finite element formulation for rotation-free shells with embedded fibers and in-plane bending

This paper presents a general, nonlinear finite element formulation for rotation-free shells with embedded fibers that captures anisotropy in stretching, shearing, twisting and bending -- both in-plane and out-of-plane. These capabilities allow for the simulation of large sheets of heterogeneous and fibrous materials either with or without matrix, such as textiles, composites, and pantographic structures. The work is a computational extension of our earlier theoretical work (Duong et al., 2021) that extends existing Kirchhoff-Love shell theory to incorporate the in-plane bending resistance of initially straight or curved fibers. The formulation requires only displacement degrees-of-freedom to capture all mentioned modes of deformation. To this end, isogeometric shape functions are used in order to satisfy the required $C^1$-continuity for bending across element boundaries. The proposed formulation can admit a wide range of material models, such as surface hyperelasticity that does not require any explicit thickness integration. To deal with possible material instability due to fiber compression, a stabilization scheme is added. Several benchmark examples are used to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed computational formulation.