The application of finite element methods to problems in structural acoustics ( the vibration of an elastic body coupled to an acoustic fluid medium) is considered. New stabilized methods based on the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle with a generalized least-squares modification are developed which yield improvement in accuracy over the standard Galerkin finite element method for both i...

Four quadrilateral elements for the Reissner-Mindlin plate model are considered. The elements are the stabilized MITC4 element of Lyly, Stenberg and Vihinen [27], the MIN4 element of Tessler and Hughes [35], the Q4BL element of Zienkiewicz et al [39] and the FMIN4 element of Kikuchi and Ishii [21]. For all elements except the Q4BL element, a unifying variational formulation is introduced, and o...