Element Behaviors of C3D8, C3D8R and C3D8I

C3D8 ELEMENT

Figure 1: 8-node brick

element

Figure 2: 2x2x2
integration point
scheme in hexahedral
elements

C3D8 finite element with two integration points along the thickness direction and a total
number of Gauss points equal to eight.
The C3D8 element is a general purpose linear brick element, fully integrated (2x2x2
integration points).
The node numbering follows the convention of Figure 1 and the integration points are
numbered according to Figure 2.
Though the structure of the element is straightforward, it should not be used in the
following situations:
Due to the full integration, the element will behave badly for isochoric material behavior,
i.e. for high values of Poisson's coefficient or plastic behavior.
The element tends to be too stiff in bending, e.g. for slender beams or thin plates under

C3D8 ELEMENT

To cause the angle A to change under the pure moment, an incorrect artificial shear stress
has been introduced. This also means that the strain energy of the element is generating
shear deformation instead of bending deformation.
The overall effect is that the linear fully integrated element becomes locked or overly stiff
under the bending moment.
Wrong displacements, false stresses and spurious natural frequencies may be reported
because of the locking.

C3D8R ELEMENT

Figure 1: 8-node brick

element

Figure 3: 1x1x1
integration point
scheme in hexahedral
elements

The C3D8R element is a general purpose linear brick element, with reduced integration
(1 integration point). Due to the reduced integration, the locking phenomena observed in
the C3D8 element do not show.
Hourglass term come into picture if you are using reduced/under integration elements.
Because of under integration you will get spurious modes, which needs to be avoided. To
avoid this spurious modes, you apply hourglass control, and energy spent for this process
is known as hourglass energy.
The element tends to be not stiff enough in bending.
Stresses, strains are most accurate in the integration points. The integration point of the
C3D8R element is located in the middle of the element. Thus, small elements are
required to capture a stress concentration at the boundary of a structure.

C3D8R ELEMENT

To visualize the deformation, notice that vertical and horizontal dotted lines and angle A
remain unchanged. This means that normal stresses and shear stresses are zero at the
integration point and there are no strain energy generated by the deformation.
This Zero-energy mode is nonphysical response, which may propagate when coarse
mesh is used. The propagation of such a mode may therefore produce meaningless
results.
The results often indicate that the structure is excessively flexible.
In order to make the reduced integration element useful, the FEA codes provide default
houglassing control internally. The user may be able to adjust control parameters.

C3D8R ELEMENT
There are 12 spurious zero energy modes leading to massive hour glassing: this means that the
correct solution is superposed by arbitrarily large displacements corresponding to the zero
energy modes.
Thus, the displacements are completely wrong. Since the zero energy modes do not lead to any
stresses, the stress field is still correct.
In practice, the C3D8R element is not very useful without hourglass control. Starting with
version 2.3 hourglass control is automatically activated for this element.
The formulation for reduced-integration elements considers only the linearly varying part of the
incremental displacement field in the element for the calculation of the increment of physical
strain.
The remaining part of the nodal incremental displacement field is the hourglass field and can
be expressed in terms of hourglass modes. Excitation of these modes may lead to severe mesh
distortion, with no stresses resisting the deformation.

C3D8I ELEMENT
The incompatible mode eight-node brick element is an improved version of the C3D8element.
C3D8I is first-order element that are enhanced by incompatible modes to improve their
bending behavior.
In addition to the standard displacement degrees of freedom, incompatible deformation
modes are added internally to the elements.
The primary effect of these modes is to eliminate the parasitic shear stresses that
cause the response of the regular first-order displacement elements to be too stiff in
bending. incompatible mode elements use full integration and, thus, have no hourglass
Modes.
In particular, shear locking is removed and volumetric locking is much reduced. The
displacements in the mesh are orders of magnitude smaller than in the reality. This is
called volumetric locking. Incompressibility is not as rare as one would think, since e.g.
most plastic matrial models or many hyperelastic material models assume isochoric
deformation.
This is obtained by supplementing the standard shape functions with so-called bubble
functions, which have a zero value at all nodes and nonzero values in between. In
CalculiX, the version detailed in [61] has been implemented. The C3D8I element should
be used in all instances, in which linear elements are subject to bending. Although the
quality of the C3D8I element is far better than the C3D8 element.
Incompatible mode elements can give very accurate results in problems
dominated by bending.

CONCLUSION
In general terms, for all numerical simulations the C3D8R finite element shows poor
behavior compared to other finite element formulations, especially when increasing the
number of layers in thickness direction. This type of finite element is clearly more sensitive
to shear locking phenomenon.
With an opposite behavior, the C3D8I finite element presents good results, improving as
the number of layer in thickness direction increases and with better approximation to
experimental results.
ABAQUS element types have unique ways to handle the numerical difficulties of shear
locking , volumetric locking and hourglassing. In the bending application and the modal
analysis, the fully integration first order solid elements exhibit shear locking. One must pay
attention to this possibility and consider not using them in this case, the user can employ
incompatible mode elements.

APPENDIX : CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

CALCULATED VALUES

Length of Beam L = 30mm

Load on end of beam P = 100N
Youngs Modulus E = 206GPa
Distance from neutral axis to extreme, c = 5mm
Moment of Inertia, I = bh3 / 12 = 833.333mm
Max. Disp = PL3 / 3EI = 0.00524mm
Max. Bending Stress = PL/Z = 18Mpa

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8

MAX=13.36M
Pa

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8

MAX=0.00658573
mm

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8R

MAX=1.732M
Pa

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8R

MAX=0.4842mm

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8I

MAX=14.16M
Pa

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

FOR ELEMENT C3D8I

MAX=0.0059064
mm

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

CALCULATED VALUES
SIMULATION
DISP(mm)

CALCULATE
D
STRESS(MPa
)

CALCULATE
D
DISP(mm)

13.36

0.006585

18

0.00524

C3D8R

1.732

0.4842

18

0.00524

C3D8I

14.16

0.00590

18

0.00524

ELEMENT
TYPE

SIMULATION
STRESS(MPa
)

C3D8

CANTILEVER BEAM ANALYSIS

C3D8

STRESS

DISP

1 ELEMENT THICKNESS

13.36

0.006586

2 ELEMENT THICKNESS

13.46

0.005542

3 ELEMENT THICKNESS

14.73

0.005566

4 ELEMENT THICKNESS

15.26

0.005644

C3D8R

STRESS

DISP

1 ELEMENT THICKNESS

1.732

0.4842

2 ELEMENT THICKNESS

10.28

0.007412

3 ELEMENT THICKNESS

12.68

0.006358

4 ELEMENT THICKNESS

12.91

0.006053

C3D8I

STRESS

DISP

1 ELEMENT THICKNESS

14.16

0.005906

2 ELEMENT THICKNESS

14.24

0.005545

3 ELEMENT THICKNESS

15.4

0.005627

4 ELEMENT THICKNESS

15.54

0.00565

CALCULATED

18

0.00524