Checkerboard Shells: A Position-Only Thin-Shell Discretization with Scale-Compatible Completion

Abstract

Checkerboard edge-midpoint geometry provides an exact planar Varignon parallelogram for every spatial quadrilateral, allowing a local tangent frame and normal to be recovered directly from nodal positions even when the raw quadrilateral is warped. Building on this property, we develop a position-only thin-shell discretization with no independent director, rotation, or strain variables. The connected edge-midpoint surface is taken as the physical midsurface: the first fundamental form is evaluated on planar B faces, while a W-centered second fundamental form is constructed from variations of neighboring B-face normals, so membrane and bending share the same geometric carrier. A variational-kernel analysis shows that smooth second-order consistency does not eliminate lattice-scale blind modes. After quotienting out the raw checkerboard gauge, the B metric has one physical membrane blind direction and the symmetric W curvature has two curvature blind directions. We introduce a quotient-minimal membrane compatibility coordinate $X_M$ and an objective reference-relative curvature coordinate $X_W^{rel}$, placed consistently in the $O(t)$ membrane and $O(t^3)$ bending sectors. The formulation admits an explicit midpoint quotient, complete flat blind-mode classification, rigid-motion objectivity, reference-state consistency, and an $O(h^2)$ near-isometry approximation result for aligned generalized cylinders. Numerical tests show second-order curvature convergence, targeted removal of the membrane defect, and a sub-percent, refinement-decaying influence of $X_W^{rel}$. Linear and nonlinear shell benchmarks further demonstrate flat bending, curved-shell membrane-bending coupling, thickness sensitivity, large rotation, nonlinear pinching, and localized ovalization within a single position-only framework.