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Efficient strong unified formulation for stress analysis of non-prismatic beam structures
Date
2021
Abstract
The Unified Formulation (UF) has gained attention as a powerful tool for efficient design of structural components. Due to the inherent flexibility of its kinematics representation, arbitrary shape functions can be selected in different dimensions to achieve a highâfidelity characterisation of structural response under load. Despite this merit, the classical isoparametric description of UF limits the application to prismatic structures. The weakâform anisoparametric approach adopted to overcome this limitation in a recent work by Patni et al. proves to be versatile yet computationally challenging owing to the expensive computation of its UF stiffness matrix by means of full volume integrals. We propose a strongâform anisoparametric UF (SUF) based on the Serendipity Lagrange Expansion (SLE) crossâsectional finite element and differential quadrature beam element. The main objective of the SUF is to achieve an efficient computation of the UF stiffness matrix by restricting Gauss operations to the variable crossâsections of nonâprismatic structures in a discrete sense, thus eliminating the need for full volume integrals. When assessed against weakâform based UF, ABAQUS FE and analytical solutions, the static analysis of nonâprismatic beamâlike structures under different loads by the SUF is shown to be accurate, numerically stable, and computationally more efficient than stateâofâtheâart methods
Supervisor
Description
peer-reviewed
Publisher
Elsevier
Citation
Composite Structures;272, 114190
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Files
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Ojo_2021_Efficient.pdf
Adobe PDF, 1.27 MB