Title: The cubic spline Hermite interpolation bases for thin plate bending quadrilateral elements
Abstract: There are some difficulties involved in obtaining conforming displacement models for plate bending. In mathematics, splines are piecewise polynomials satisfying certain continuity conditions. The shape functions can be treated as splines. It has been demonstrated that the spline method is an efficient tool for developing high accuracy elements. In this paper, we reconstruct two conforming quadrilateral thin plate elements by using the cubic spline Hermite interpolation bases defined on the quadrilateral elements. They both have good accuracy for the numerical examples and are less insensitive to mesh distortions than the well-known DKQ element.