Large Displacement Finite Element Analysis of Spatial Beams. (part 2). Numerical Results.

In Part 1, the authors presented a new nonlinear finite element formulation of a spatial beam element, and obtained an unsymmetric tangent stiffness matrix. In this paper, firstly we solve two examples of plane and spatial deformations and show that the use of artificially symmetrised tangent stiffness matrix does not decrease the accuracy of the solution. Then, three numerical examples of spatial post-buckling problems are presented, indicating the accuracy and the efficiency of the proposed method.