A SPACE-TIME SPLINE ELEMENT BASED ON GURTIN-TYPE PRINCIPLES

Dynamic analysis of structures is often of great importance in engineering. But the traditional method for dynamic analysis cannot consider all initial conditions in computing. It is believed that Gurtin-type variational principle is the only variational principle, which can take into account the initial displacement and velocity by now. In this paper, based on Gurtin variational principles, a spline method for initial value problems of beam is presented by applying spline method to both space and time domain. Numeric results show that highly accurate of results can be obtained by using the method in comparison with those using other available methods for dynamic analysis.