EAW Maunder, JPBM Almeida, ACA Ramsay,
International Journal for Numerical Methods in Engineering, 39, 3175-3194, 1996;
This paper illustrates a method whereby a family of robust equilibrium elements can be formulated in a general manner. The effects of spurious kinematic modes, present to some extent in all primitive equilibrium elements, are eliminated by judicious assembly into macro-equilibrium elements. These macro-elements are formulated with sufficient generality so as to retain the polynomial degree of the stress field as a variable. Such a family of macro-elements is a new developments, and results for polynomial of degree greater than two have not been seen before. The quality of the results for macro-equilibrium elements with varying degrees of polynomial is demonstrated by numerical examples.