Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

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Computers and Structures

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/compstruc

A curvature smoothing HsiehCloughTocher element for yield design

of reinforced concrete slabs
Canh V. Le a,, Phuong H. Nguyen b, Thang Q. Chu a
a
b

Department of Civil Engineering, International University VNU HCMC, Viet Nam

Faculty of Applied Mechanics and Civil Engineering, University of Technical Education HCMC, Viet Nam

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 11 September 2014
Accepted 9 February 2015

Keywords:
Limit-state
Collapse load
Reinforced concrete slabs
Conic optimization
Smoothing technique
CS-HCT

a b s t r a c t
This paper describes a numerical kinematic formulation for yield design of reinforced concrete slabs governed by Nielsen yield criterion. A cell-based smoothing technique is introduced to original Hsieh
CloughTocher (HCT) element, ensuring that only rst derivatives of shape functions are needed to establish stabilized curvatures. The size of the resulting optimization problem is reduced signicantly due to
the fact that only one integration point is needed per sub-element. The discrete optimization problem
was solved using a highly efcient primaldual interior point algorithm. The proposed numerical procedure is applied to various reinforced concrete slab problems with arbitrary geometries and different
boundary conditions.
2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
In recent years, yield design or limit analysis of reinforced concrete slabs [1,2] has gained an increasing interest due to a wider
acceptance of perfect plasticity applications in the new Euro-code
for concrete structures. Various approaches can be used to estimate of the load required to cause collapse of such a structure.
Owning to their advantages, numerical approaches based on bound
theorems and mathematical programming have been developed
over past decades [38]. In the kinematic formulation, velocity
elds must be discretized using continuous, discontinuous nite
elements [9] or discontinuities-only [10]. Of several continuous
displacement elements that have been developed for Krichhoff
plates in bending, the conforming HCT elements [11] are commonly utilized in practical engineering.
When the displacement/velocity elds are approximated and
the upper-bound theorem is applied, limit analysis becomes an
optimization problem (for convenience, the term displacement is
here used as shorthand for displacement rate). Of several optimization techniques that have been developed to solve such the
large-scale optimization problem, the primaldual interior-point
method presented in [12,13], which was implemented in commercial codes such as the Mosek software package [14], has been found
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: lvcanh@hcmiu.edu.vn (C.V. Le), cqthang@hcmiu.edu.vn
(T.Q. Chu).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.compstruc.2015.02.009
0045-7949/ 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

to be more efcient and robust [1517,7,18,19,9,20]. Making use of

such an optimization technique, the plastic dissipation function or
the yield criterion must be cast in the form of a standard secondorder cone constraint. However, it should be stressed that the size
of the resulting optimization problem increases rapidly due to
auxiliary variables introduced. The number of these auxiliary variables often depends on the number of integration points used. It is
therefore worthwhile to explore a range of alternative integration
techniques that require a small number of integration points while
providing accurate solutions.
In the effort to further advance meshfree methods, Chen et al.
[21] have proposed a strain smoothing technique to stabilize a
direct nodal integration in mesh-free methods. The strain smoothing technique is then applied to the framework of nite element
method (FEM), forming a class of smoothed nite element methods, e.g. see Liu et al. [22], and references therein. It has been
shown that the method retains most properties of the strain
smoothing technique and advantages of FEM, and therefore yields
solutions that are accurate and computational inexpensive. The
main idea of the smoothing technique is that elemental strains
are determined by spatially averaging eld values using the divergence theorem. The resulting strains are constant over a smoothing
cell, and hence problems involving integration can be treated in a
very straightforward manner. Following this line of research, the
main objective of this paper is to develop a displacement nite
element for plate in bending, which combines the original HCT
conforming elements with the smoothing technique, ensuring that

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C.V. Le et al. / Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

accurate solutions can be obtained with minimal computational

cost.
The layout of the paper is as follows. The next section will
describe a kinematic formulation for yield design or limit analysis
of reinforced concrete slabs governed by Nielsens yield criterion. A
curvature cell-based smoothed HCT element (CS-HCT) and associated discrete kinematic formulation are described in Section 3.
Numerical examples are provided in Section 4 to illustrate the performance of the proposed procedure.
2. Kinematic limit analysis of reinforced concrete slabs
Consider a thin rigid-perfectly plastic plate bounded by a curve
enclosing a plane area X with kinematic boundary Cu and static
boundary Ct , and subjected to an out-of-plane load kq. The exact
collapse multiplier kexact can be determined by solving any of the
following optimization problems [7]

kexact maxfk j 9 m 2 B : am; u kFu; 8u 2 Yg

max minam; u

min maxam; u

minDu;

m2B
u2C

u2C

m2B

u2C

where C fu 2 Y j Fu 1g; Du maxm2B am; u is the plastic

dissipation rate, Y is a space of kinematically admissible velocity
elds u; B is the yield condition and Fu; am; u are the external
and internal virtual work respectively given by

Fu

The above relations are the intersection of two rotated quadratic cones

bi Q i m 2 K3r ;

i 1; 2

with

3
2 3
mpx
1 0
0
6
7
6
7
Q 1 4 0 1 0 5; b1 4 mpy 5;
p
0
0
0
2
2
3
2  3
1 0 0
mpx
6
7
6
7
Q 2 4 0 1 0 5; b2 4 mpy 5
p
0 0
2
0

The upper bound on the collapse load of reinforced concrete slabs

can be then determined by the following mathematical programming [26]

R
R 
k min Du X dudX X mpx jx mpy jy mpx jx mpy jx dX
8
3

>
> jx ; jy ;2jxy 2 Kr
>
>
>
>
> jx ; jy ;2jxy 2 K3
r
>
>
>
>
> jx jx  jx
<
s:t jy jy  jy
>
>
p
>
>
>
jxy  2jxy jxy
>
>
>
> u 0 on C
>
u
>
>
:
Fu 1

10

q u dX
X
Z
Z
mT j dX  mT r2 u dX
am; u
X

5
6

where the last two constraints enforce boundary conditions and

unitary external work.

In this study, the yield criterion proposed by Nielsen [23,24] and

Wolfensberger [25], which is commonly known as Nielsens yield
criterion, is used for the analysis of reinforced concrete slabs. The
criterion is expressed as

3. A curvature cell-based smoothed HCT element

mpx  mxx mpy  myy P m2xy

First, the C1-conforming HCT element for bending plates is

recalled. The problem domain is discretized into triangular ele-

mpx mxx mpy myy P m2xy

 mpx 6 mxx 6 mpx

 mpy 6 myy 6 mpy


where m
px and mpy are the negative yield moments in the x and y

directions, respectively, and similarly m

px and mpy are the positive
yield moments in the two directions. The constraints in (7) represent a bi-conical yield surface, as shown in Fig. 1.

3.1. Existing HCT element

ments such as X  X1 [ X2 [ . . . [ Xnel and Xi \ X j ; i j. A triangular element is then subdivided into 3 sub-elements using
individual cubic expansions over each sub-element as shown in
Fig. 2. The element has 12 degrees of freedom: the transverse displacements and 2 the rotation components at each corner node
(wi ; hxi @wi =@x ji ; hyi @wi =@y ji ; i 1; 2; 3) and normal rotations
at 3 mid-side nodes (hi @wi =@n ji ; i 4; 5; 6).
The displacement expansion wk can be expressed in terms of
area coordinates f f1 ; f2 ; f3 over each sub-triangle as



k
wk f Nek f N0 fF qe ;

mxy
myy

mxx

Fig. 1. Yield criterion for reinforced concrete slabs (after Nielsen and Wolfensberger
[23,25,24]).

k 1; 2; 3

11

where the partitions Nk

e f and N0 f respectively represent the
interpolation functions associated with element displacements qe
and internal nodal displacements and F is the matrix of elimination
obtained by applying compatible requirements at internal nodes 7,
8, 9.
The curvatures can be then determined by

k
Ne;xx N0;xx F
ve;xx
jk
xx
6
7
6
7
6
7
k
k
7 6 k
7
6 k 7
jk 6
4 jyy 5 4 Ne;yy N0;yy F 5 qe 4 ve;yy 5 qe
k
jk
vk
Nk
xy
e;xy
e;xy N0;xy F

12

It should be noted that for accurate computation of compatible curvatures dened in Eq. (12) (at least) three Gauss points per sub-element are required to perform numerical integration of the plastic
dissipation function. Consequently, the number of variables in the

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C.V. Le et al. / Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

Fig. 2. HCT element.

problem involving second-order cone programming increases

rapidly. In the following, we will present a technique that requires
only one integration point per sub-element.
3.2. Cell-based smoothed HCT element
In the smoothed nite element method (S-FEM), the problem
domain X is divided into a set of N s non-overlap and no-gap
smoothing domains Xs such as X  X1 [ X2 [ . . . [ XNs

and

It is worth noting that curvatures determined by Eq. (16) are

constant over a smoothing cell, and hence only one integration will
be needed to perform numerical integration of a function of these
smoothed curvatures. Moreover, the computation of the smoothed
curvatures is inexpensive due to only rst derivatives of shape
functions needed. This is not the case for the original HCTs curvatures where second derivatives involving.
3.3. CS-HCT based kinematic formulation

Xi \ X j ; i j. Generally, such a division can be arbitrary.

However, in practice it is usually performed based on element
entities, such as cells residing in elements, nodes, or edges of the
elements for easy formulation, numerical treatments, implementation, and efcient computation [22]. These smoothing domain can
be further divided into a set of sub-smoothing domains. For the
sake of simplicity, here triangle elements and its sub-elements
are respectively chosen as smoothing and sub-smoothing domains.
Introducing such a cell-based smoothing technique, stabilized
curvatures can be determined by

j~ k xC

Z
Xek
C

jk x/xdX

13

where /x is a distribution function or a smoothing function that is

positive and normalized to unity:

Z
Xek
C

/x dX 1

If compatible curvatures determined by Eq. (12) and numerical

integration are used, the plastic dissipation and the work done by
applied loads can be respectively expressed as

e1 k1 j1

/x

15

otherwise

where AkC is the area of the smoothing cell Xek

C that will be a subelement here. Substituting Eq. (15) into Eq. (13), and applying the
divergence theorem, one obtains the following equation

j~ k xC

1
AC

Z
Xek
C

jk xdX v~ ek xC qe

16

in which

v~ e;kab xC

1
2AkC

Ck

k
vk
e;a xnb x ve;b xna x dC

17

k
where Ck is the boundary of Xek
C ; ve;a x Ne;a x N0;a xF.
Performing numerical boundary integration, Eq. (17) can be
rewritten as

v~ e;kab xC

3
X

2AkC

L j ve;ka xGj nb xGj ve;b xGj na xGj

18

where xGj is the Gauss point (mid-point) of boundary segment Ckj

which has length L j and outward surface normal n j .

20

where nel is the number of elements, ng 3 is the number of Gauss

nel X
3
X



AkC mpx jx mpy jy mpx jx mpy jx

e1 k1

1=AkC ; x 2 Xek
C
0;

ng
nel X
3 X
X
nj p wek fj

integration points in each sub-element Ak ; nj is the weighting factor of the Gauss point fj .
When employing the smooth version of the curvatures rather
than compatible curvatures, the plastic dissipation becomes

14

For simplicity, the smoothing function / is taken as

19

e;k;j

e1 k1 j1

D
(

ng
nel X
3 X


X
nj mpx jx mpy jy mpx jx mpy jx

21

e;k

Finally, the upper bound on the collapse load of reinforced concrete slabs can be determined by the following optimization
problem

k min

nel X
3


X
AkC mpx jx mpy jy mpx jx mpy jx
e1 k1

e;k

8
j ; j ; 2jxy e;k 2 Kr3 ; with k 1; 2; 3; e 1; 2; . . . ; nel
>
>
> x y
>
>
3
>



>
> jx ; jy ; 2jxy e;k 2 Kr
>
>
>
>
k
<v
~ e;xx
qe jx  jx e;k
s:t
k
>v
>
~ e;yy
qe jy  jy e;k
>
>
>
> k
p
>
>
>
v~ q 2jxy jxy e;k
>
> e;xy e
>
:
Aed v beq
22
where the matrix Aeq and vector beq are obtained from unitary
external work and boundary conditions, and v is the global displacement vector. This optimization problem is already in the form
of a standard second order cone programming involving equality
and quadratic cone constraints. The total number of variables
including the global number of kinematic degrees of freedom sdof
and auxiliary variables is N v ar sdof nel  3  6. The number of

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C.V. Le et al. / Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

second-order cone constraints is Ncone nel  3  2. These numbers

are approximately three times smaller than those in the formulation using the usual Gauss integration with the same discretization
nite element mesh.
It should be noted that the collapse multiplier determined using
the described procedure is not guaranteed to represent a strict
upper-bound on the exact value because the smoothed curvatures
were used instead of the compatible ones. However, as the numerical discretization becomes increasingly ne one can expect to
achieve an increasingly reliable approximation of the actual
collapse load multiplier.

Table 1
Results for clamped square plates using HCT and CS-HCT elements.
Meshes

k
10  10
15  15
20  20
25  25
30  30

48.43
46.62
45.71
45.19
44.83

CS-HCT
e (%)

var

t (s)

e (%)

var

t (s)

13.02
8.80
6.69
5.46
4.60

11,163
25,068
44,523
69,528
100,083

1
3
93
249
460

48.28
46.47
45.58
45.08
44.81

12.68
8.44
6.38
5.21
4.58

3963
8868
15,723
24,528
35,283

1
1
2
3
5

e: the relative error; var: the number of variables; t: optimization CPU time.

1.15

This section will investigate the performance of the proposed

solution procedure via a number of benchmark problems in which
analytical and other numerical solutions are available. For all the
examples considered in the following parameters were assumed:
length L 10 m, plate thickness t = 0.1 m. The proposed numerical
procedure is developed in a Matlab environment (version 7.11) and
the resulting SOCP minimization problems are solved using Mosek
(version 6.0) on a 2.50 GHz Intel i5 running Windows 7.
Square slabs with either simply supports or clamped on all
edges and subjected to uniform out-of plane pressure loading were
considered. Owing to symmetry, only the upper-right quarter of
the plate is modeled, see Fig. 3. It is assumed that the slab is
isotropic with positive and negative yield moments mp in both
directions (constant reinforcement). For this case, the Nielsen yield
criterion may be represented as a square yield locus in the plane of
the principal moments, and analytical solutions have been
identied by Prager [27] as k 24mp =qL2 and by Fox [28] as
k 42:851mp =qL2 for simply supported and clamped plates,
respectively.
The efcacy of the proposed method was studied rst. The
clamped slab was solved using both HCT and CS-HCT elements
with various uniform meshes of N  N (N 10; 15; 20; 25; 30).
Computed collapse multipliers and computational cost are shown
in Table 1. Convergence behaviour of HCT and CS-HCT elements
is also shown in Fig. 4. It can be observed that for all meshes solutions obtained using CS-HCT elements are lower (better) than
those obtained using HCT elements, despite the fact that the number of variables and optimization CPU time used in CS-HCT based
formulation are very much smaller than those used in HCT based

1.1
1.05

HCT
CSHCT

1
0.95
0.9
0.85
0.8
0.75
0.7
0.65
1.1

0.9

0.8

0.7

0.6

log (mesh size h)

10

Fig. 4. Clamped square slab: convergence behaviour of HCT and CS-HCT elements.

Table 2
 
m
Limit load factor of simply supported plate in comparison with other solutions qLp2
Authors

Yield criterion

Upper bound

Lower bound

CS-HCT
Bleyer et al. [9] T6b
Bleyer et al. [9] H3
Le et al. [29]
Le et al. [17,29]
Hodge and Belytschko [30]
Capsoni and Corradi [31]
Andersen et al. [32]

Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
von Mises
von Mises
von Mises
von Mises

24.07
24.00
24.43

25.01
26.54
25.02
25.00

23.996
24.98
24.86

Table 3
 
m
Limit load factor of clamped plate in comparison with other solutions qLp2

L/2

log (Relative error in collapse load)

10

4. Numerical examples

x
N

L/2

HCT

Authors

Yield criterion

Upper bound

Lower bound

CS-HCT
Bleyer et al. [9] T6b
Bleyer et al. [9] H3
Le et al. [29]
Krabbenhoft [33]
Maunder et al. [20]
Le et al. [17,29]
Hodge and Belytschko [30]
Capsoni and Corradi [31]
Andersen et al. [32]

Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
Nielsen
von Mises
von Mises
von Mises
von Mises

44.81
44.03
43.45

45.07
49.25
45.29
44.13

42.83
42.82
42.00
43.86
42.86

L/2

L/2

Fig. 3. Square slab: geometry, loading and nite element mesh (N is the number of
nodes in each edge).

procedure. For simply supported slab, both HCT and CS-HCT elements can provide extremely satisfactory solutions, with less than
0.3% errors using a mesh of just 450 three-node triangle elements.
However, the number of variables in CS-FEM based formulation is
relatively small, with 8868 compared with 25,068 variables in HCT
formulation.

C.V. Le et al. / Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

63

Fig. 5. Polygon slabs: nite element mesh.

Fig. 6. Polygon slabs: plastic dissipation distribution and collapse multiplier (A is the area of the slab).

Fig. 8. Arbitrary geometric slab with an eccentric rectangular cutout: nite element
mesh.

Fig. 7. Arbitrary geometric slab with an eccentric rectangular cutout.

Tables 2 and 3 compare solutions obtained using CS-FEM based

formulation with previously obtained solutions obtained using
other simulations. It is worth mentioning that upper bound collapse multipliers of slabs governed by Nielsen yield criterion were
rarely reported, with the exception of those obtained by Bleyer
et al. [9]. It can be seen that for simply supported slabs, the proposed CS-HCT element performs better than H3 element in [9]
where discontinuities have been included. T3, T6 and T6b elements
can provide the exact bound when using a structured mesh along
the diagonal direction. However, these elements seem to be very
sensitive the mesh layout. For clamped slabs, the performance of

T6b and H3 is better than CS-HCT. This can be explained by the fact
that the discontinuous T6b and H3 elements ensure its edges automatically oriented along the negative yield lines, and hence plastic
dissipation along clamped boundaries can be easily produced.
Rectangular slabs (dimensions a  b) under uniform pressure
and different boundary conditions including free (F), simply supported (S) and clamped (C) edges were also considered.
Computed collapse multipliers were reported in Table 4, with
a  b 2. The plate with 3 clamped and 1 free edge was solved
using 50  25 nodes using half symmetry whilst in the remaining
cases quarter symmetry was used with 32  16 nodes. Again, it
can be seen that the CS-HCT elements can provide smaller (better)
upper bound solutions than the HCT elements, despite the fact that
the number of variables used in the CS-HCT based formulation is
very much smaller than that in the HCT-based formulation.

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C.V. Le et al. / Computers and Structures 152 (2015) 5965

Table 4
 
m
Collapse limit load of rectangular slabs with various boundary conditions qabp
Models

Criterion

CCCC

SSSS

CFCF

CCCF

HCT

Nielsen

k
var

54.59
56,979

28.73
56,979

8.34
56,979

43.03
69,489

CS-HCT

Nielsen

k
var

54.44
20,115

28.54
20,115

8.33
20,115

42.96
24,489

Le et al. [17]
Capsoni et al. [31]

von Mises
von Mises

54.61

29.88
29.88

9.49

43.86

Table 5
Collapse load for the isotropic reinforcement slab with different negative moment
capacity.
m
p
m
p

1
2

1
4

1
8

k m
p

0.1420

0.1298

0.1233

0.1217

The last example involves an arbitrary geometric slab with an

eccentric rectangular cutout, of the same geometry as examined
previously in [6]. The dimensions (in meter) and boundary conditions are shown in Fig. 7. The problem was solved using a mesh
of 1942 elements as shown in Fig. 8. First, isotropic reinforcement
slab is considered. The inuence of the negative moment capacity
on the collapse multiplier is illustrated in Table 5. It can be seen
that the collapse load factor decreases monotonically as the negative moment capacity reduces. In the case of isotropic reinforce
ment with m
p mp mp , the computed solution of 0:142  mp
is in good agreement with the solution of 0:148  mp reported in
[33]. Plastic dissipation distribution and collapse mechanism for
this case are also shown in Figs. 9 and 10. Orthotropic slab with
unequally negative and positive moment capacity with the reinforcement ratio mpy =mpx 0:5 was also studied. The collapse multiplier of 0:086  mpx was obtained.
5. Conclusions

Fig. 9. Arbitrary geometric slab with an eccentric rectangular cutout: plastic

dissipation distribution.

A numerical limit analysis procedure for computation of upper

bound on the collapse load of reinforced slabs has been described.
The smoothing technique is combined with the original HCT elements. The size of the resulting optimization is reduced signicantly, and accurate solutions can be obtained with minimal
computational cost. Second-order cone programming solver,
Mosek, has been used to produce approximated upper bounds on
the collapse load of several practical reinforced concrete slabs
(although the procedure cannot be guaranteed to produce strict
upper bound solutions, for the problems investigated solutions
were always higher than known exact solutions). It has been
shown in numerical examples that the proposed method can also
be able to capture yield-line patterns arising from localized plastic
deformations for problems of arbitrary geometry. Including discontinuities to the proposed CS-HCT elements may improve the
accuracy of the solutions, and this will be the subject of future
research. Furthermore, the CS-FEM can be extended to tackle various problems such as shakedown analysis and dynamics of plates.
Acknowledgements

x 10

This research is funded by Vietnam National University Ho Chi

Minh City (VNU-HCMC) under Grant No. B2014-28-01.

References

0
5

6
20

10
15

10

15
5

Fig. 10. Arbitrary geometric slab with an eccentric rectangular cutout: collapse
mechanism.

Further illustration of the method can be made by examining

polygon slabs of edge L with simply supported boundary conditions. Here numerical solutions were obtained by using regular
meshes of 1083 elements for triangle slab and 1152 elements for
hexagon slab, as shown in Fig. 5. Plastic dissipation distribution
and collapse multipliers for triangular and hexagon slabs are
shown in Fig. 6.

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