FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF BAR AND BEAM COMPOSITE STRUCTURES

Bar and beam composite structures can take full advantage of the physical properties of building materials. It is an ordinary structural form in civil engineering. The different degrees of freedom of bar and beam elements bring in difficulties in theoretic analysis and numerical simulation. This study focuses on the problem of integrating an assembled stiffness matrix for the internal force analysis of bar and beam composite structures. The link table is established based on the connection relationship between different structural members. The correspondence between the global stiffness matrix and local stiffness matrix is deduced with the link table. A whole finite element analysis model based on the proposed link table is then established. The results of the example analyses prove the correctness and the usefulness of the link table method in this paper. The proposed method can effectively deal with force analysis of bar and beam composite structures. This method provides a simple and reliable way to solve the problem of composite structures with elements of different number of degrees of freedom.