Abstract: The fiber reinforced plastic shells with honeycomb sandwich are commonly applied to space structures. To describe the structures' behavior and connect laminate with 3D brick elements better, a kind of 32 nodes and 3 layers shell element with relative-freedom is presented based on the 3D FEM. To eliminate the discontinuity of the interlaminar stress and satisfy the load boundary conditions, a method for computing interlaminar stresses is presented also. 3D brick elements combined with 32 nodes and 3 layers shell elements are applied for modeling complex structures such as laminated composite shells with variable thickness or reinforcements. Numerical examples indicate that the results obtained by the present method are satisfying.