This paper presents an enhanced formulation of the 3-noded triangular DKMT18 [49] flat shell element with 18 degrees of freedom. The proposed DKMT18 element introduces a smoothed nodal normal field across adjacent elements, enabling the computation of pseudo-curvatures and ensuring full coupling between membrane and bending behaviours. Nodal translations and rotations are interpolated using linear shape functions, while rotational fields are further enriched with quadratic functions to represent temporary DOFs at the element centroid. To eliminate the temporary DOFs at element mid-sides and mitigate shear locking, a constant kinematic description combined with mixed transverse shear strain interpolation is employed. Additionally, an artificial drilling rotational stiffness is incorporated to prevent rank deficiency in the stiffness matrix. The robustness and the accuracy of the proposed element are demonstrated through standard benchmark problems, including the twisted beam and Raasch’s hook. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed enhanced DKMT18 element provides accurate and convergent solutions, consistently outperforming the original DKMT18 formulation [49]. The study highlights the critical role of pseudo-curvatures in enhancing the robustness and efficiency of the proposed shell element for structural analysis. © 2026 Elsevier Ltd. All rights are reserved, including those for text and data mining, AI training, and similar technologies.