About a multinodal in-plane curved beam finite element for structures

摘要

The stiffness and mass matrices of an n-node inplane curved beam finite element are derived an introduced in this paper. Lagrangian shape functions are used for its derivation. The element is based upon the Timoshenko's beam theory, and the reduced integration approach is considered. This leads to an element of a wide application range within the in-plane curved framed structures.