ABSTRACT
A numerical approach to model thin-walled structures with anisotropic high-order finite hexahedral elements is presented. With an appropriate variation of the polynomial degrees an efficient discretization of a structural dynamic problem is found and then applied to a coupled fluid-structure interaction computation. Since a quasi-optimal choice of the polynomial degrees for every element as well as for every local direction of each element is highly desirable, an automatic p-adaptive method is presented and its effectivity is demonstrated with a numerical example.