Cristian Gallardo successfully completed his MSc thesis! Congratulations! He did a fantastic job implementing two types of layered solid elements and made them work with BECAS3D. We will now finish its implementation so we can use them for the optimization of laminated composite beams. It is possible in this way to separate the mesh descritization from the layer descritization. This will be great for the optimization where the material of each layer can be optimized separately. Contact me if you would like to have a copy of his thesis.
Figure above: Left is the standard way to represent layered structures where each layer is represented by an element. Right is the new layered elements where each layer is an integral part of the element. It is possible using this elements to reduce the number of degrees of freedom without losing of accuracy