A Nonlinear Dynamic Beam Element with Explicit Algorithms*

Considering the big displacement and the big rotation, adopting multiple accurate techniques to describe the geometrical nonlinearity, a beam element with explicit algorithms was presented. In order to obtain the coordinate transform matrix, the finite rotation theory and the yoshida method were used to determine the node direction vectors and the element direction vectors respectively. Using the Co-Rotational method, the deformation of the beam was calculated. To overcome the convergence difficulty of implicit approach, the explicit algorithms was used. Compared with numerical result of commercial FE code ANSYS, the beam shows very good performance.