Working with Section Stiffness
In some cases, shell models are used as a homogenized approximation of a thin inhomogeneous structure. Examples of this are perforated sheets and corrugated sheets, but also laminates. For such cases, a single material model together with a thickness does not contain enough information to set up the model.
The Section Stiffness material model provides an option to describe the shell properties directly in terms of quantities such as membrane stiffness, bending stiffness, and so on.
Actually, Linear Elastic Material, Layered is a special case of such a homogenized model, where the homogenization is performed in the thickness direction. The ABD matrices computed as side effect by this material model provides exactly the same form of data that is used as input in the Section Stiffness node.