NONLINEAR FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS FOR THE ULTIMATE STRENGTH OF MULTIPLANNAR TUBULAR JOINT

A four-node general quadrilateral shell element for geometric and material non-linear analysis is employed in the modeling of tubular joint, an automatic incremental algorithm is adopted in the solution of nonlinear finite element equations. Based on the ADINA code, the preprocessing and post-processing programs are developed which reduce the computational cost of the ultimate strength of multiplannar tubular joints including joints between circular hollow sections, joints between square hollow sections and circular hollow sections. Numerical results are compared with to the experimental results. Good agreement is achieved.