The typical quadrangular and triangular elements for thin plate bending based on Kirchhoff assumptions are the nonconforming elements with low computational accuracy and limitative application range in finite element method(FEM). Some compatible elements can be developed by the means of supplementing correction functions, increasing nodes in element or on the boundaries, expanding nodal degrees of freedom(DOF), etc, but these elements are inconvenient to apply in practice for the high calculation complexity. In this paper, in order to overcome the defects of thin plate bending finite element, numerical manifold method(NMM) was introduced to solve thin plate bending deformation problem. Rectangular mesh was adopted as mathematical mesh to form finite element cover system, and then 16-cover manifold element was proposed. Numerical manifold formulas were constructed on the basis of minimum potential energy principle, displacement boundary conditions are implemented by penalty function method, and all the element matrixes were derived in details. The 16-cover element has a simple calculation process for employing only the transverse displacement cover DOFs as the basic unknown variables, and has been proved to meet the requirements of completeness and full compatibility. As an application, the presented 16-cover element has been used to analyze bending deformation of square thin plate under different loads and boundary conditions, and the results show that numerical manifold method with compatible element, compared with finite element method, can improve computational accuracy and convergence greatly.
