ON EVALUATION OF THE THREE-DIMENSIONAL ISOGEOMETRIC BEAM ELEMENT

Abstract

The exact description of the arbitrarily curved geometries, including conic sections, is an undeniable advantage of isogeometric analysis (IGA) over standard finite element method (FEM). With B-spline/NURBS approximation functions used for both geometry and unknown approximations, IGA is able to exactly describe beams of various shapes and thus eliminate the geometry approximation errors. Moreover, naturally higher continuity than standard C0 can be provided along the entire computational domain. This paper evaluates the performance of the nonlinear spatial Bernoulli beam adapted from formulation of Bauer et al. [1]. The element formulation is presented and the comparison with standard FEM straight beam element and fully three-dimensional analysis is provided. Although the element is capable of geometrically nonlinear analysis, only geometrically linear cases are evaluated for the purposes of this study.