Study of the Discrete Shear Gap Technique in Timoshenko Beam Elements
Abstract: A major difficulty
in formulating a finite element for shear-deformable beams, plates, and shells
is the shear locking phenomenon. A recently proposed general technique to
overcome this difficulty is the discrete shear gap (DSG) technique. In this
study, the DSG technique was applied to the linear, quadratic, and cubic
Timoshenko beam elements. With this technique, the displacement-based shear
strain field was replaced with a substitute shear strain field obtained from
the derivative of the interpolated shear gap. A series of numerical tests were
conducted to assess the elements performance. The results showed that the DSG
technique works perfectly to eliminate the shear locking. The resulting deflection,
rotation, bending moment, and shear force distributions were very accurate and
converged optimally to the corresponding analytical solutions. Thus the beam
elements with the DSG technique are better alternatives than those with the
classical selective-reduced integration.
Author: Foek Tjong Wong,
Steven Sugianto
Journal Code: jptsipilgg170038
