Effects of shear deformation on large deflection behavior of elastic frames

Abstract

In this paper, the effects of shear deformation on the large deflection behavior of elastic frames is investigated by the finite element method. A two-node nonlinear beam element with the shear deformation is formulated and employed to analyze some frame structures. The element based on the energy method is developed in the context of the corotational approach. A bracketing procedure u ed the lowest eigenvalue of structural tangent stiffness matrix as indicating parameter is adopted to compute the critical loads. An incremental iterative procedure with the arc-length control technique is employed to trace the equilibrium paths. The numerical results show that the shear deformation plays an important role in the critical load and the large deflection behavior of the frames constructed from the components having low slenderness. A detail investigation is carried out to highlight the influence of slenderness on the behavior of the frames under large deflection.