An FEA trainer told me quad elements should be used for shell structures like sheetmetal structures. If triangular elements are used, it is not suitable and certification firms does not accept results.What do you say about using quad or triangular elements for shell structures?
I guess triangular elements will require more elements in the model. I see in the literature that triangular are used for concrete to simulate cracks. All in all, it is your decision depending on the most used in the literature for your case.
In FEA, meshing can be done using the following elements: 3 Node Triangular Element (3NQE)= Low-order component; 4 Node Quadrilateral Element (4NQE) = First-order component; 8 Node Quadrilateral Element (8NQE)= higher-order component.
3 Node Triangular Element (3NQE) are widely used in FEA. However, it is always of low accuracy due to its low order of trial functions. Therefore, the First-order component and higher-order component are utilized in practice because of their accuracy. More and Bindu (2015) reported the impact of stress mesh density on finite element analysis of plate structure, which reveals that small element size yields precise results, and may take a longer processing time. Likewise, large element size may lead to less precise results with smaller processing time.
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