Two refined quadrilateral flat shell elements named RSQ20 and RSQ24 are constructed in this paper based on the refined non‐conforming element method, and the elements can satisfy the displacement compatibility requirement at the interelement of the non‐planar elements by introducing the common displacements suggested by Chen and Cheung. A refined quadrilateral plate element RPQ4 and a plane quadrilateral isoparametric element are combined to obtain the refined quadrilateral flat shell element RSQ20, and a refined quadrilateral flat shell element RSQ24 is constructed on the basis of a RPQ4 element and a quadrilateral isoparametric element with drilling degrees of freedom. The numerical examples show that the present method can improve the accuracy of shell analysis and that the two new refined quadrilateral flat shell elements are efficient and accurate in the linear analysis of some shell structures. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SUMMARYA reÿned non-conforming triangular plate=shell element for geometric non-linear analysis of plates=shells using the total Lagrangian=updated Lagrangian approach is constructed in this paper based on the reÿned non-conforming element method for geometric non-linear analysis. The Allman's triangular plane element with vertex degrees of freedom and the reÿned triangular plate-bending element RT9 are used to construct the present element. Numerical examples demonstrate that the accuracy of the new element is quite high in the geometric non-linear analysis of plates=shells.