Studies on knot placement techniques for the geometry construction and the accurate simulation of isogeometric spatial curved beams

The present paper investigates the use of different knot placement techniques for isogeometric analysis of spatial curved beams, to enhance analysis results in cases when geometries are given in terms of data points. Focusing on analysis-aware modeling for structural static and vibration simulations of spatial free-form curved beams, the knot placement techniques based on uniformly spaced knots as well as on De Boor’s and Piegl and Tiller’s algorithms are studied. For this purpose, an isogeometric formulation for linear Euler–Bernoulli beams based on the Euler–Rodriguez transformation rule is implemented. Different case studies and numerical examples are presented and the results are validated against “overkill” solutions computed with a commercial finite element software. The results show that the De Boor’s knot placement algorithm typically leads to better approximation errors and is therefore the suggested strategy for this kind of problems.