A numerical study of static bending of reissner-mindlin plate using a virtual element method

In this paper, we develop an arbitrary order virtual element method for the static bending analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates. The transverse displacement and rotations are independently interpolated with the functions defined in the virtual element spaces. The interpolation functions for transverse displacement are one order higher than the functions for rotations. Due to the advantages of insensitivity to the elemental distortion and allowance of hanging nodes in the virtual element method, a simple mesh generation scheme is employed to generate polygonal mesh by using an initial background grid and a quadtree refinement approach. Some examples are studied to verify the accuracy and convergence of the developed method. The high convergence rates for transverse displacement and rotations could be observed from the numerical results.