A mixed finite element model for plane strain elastic—plastic analysis Part II. Application to the 4-node bilinear element Original Research Article

In this paper, the results of part I of this study are applied to the 4-node bilinear element. The trial functions for different fields are defined consistently with the a-priori conditions established, the rate problem is generalized to cover finite loading steps and the solution strategy is presented. Computations referred to some discriminating examples from the literature demonstrate that the proposed model is actually capable of predicting the perfectly plastic collapse load for pathological plane strain problems, exhibits excellent performances with coarse meshes and is rather insensitive to mesh distortion.