A reconstructed edge-based smoothed triangular element, which is incorporated with the discrete shear gap (DSG) method, is formulated based on the global coordinate for analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates. A symbolic integration combined with the smoothing technique is implemented to calculate the smoothed finite element matrices, which is integrated along the boundaries of each smoothing cell. Numerical results show that the proposed element is free from shear locking, and its results are in good agreement with the exact solutions, even for very thin plates with extremely distorted elements. The proposed element gives more accurate results than the original DSG element without smoothing, and it can be taken as an alternative element for analysis of Reissner-Mindlin plates. The prominent feature of the present element is that the integration scheme is unified in the smoothed form for all of the finite element matrices.
