ASSIGNMENT -1 ME 5130 - FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

FINITE ELEMENT PROGRAM FOR FRAME

Description of the problem:
Consider a portal frame structures shown below.
a) Write a finite element program to compute the displacements and rotations at the point of
application of load.
b) Verify your results by solving the same problem using symmetry/antisymmetry boundary
conditions at the point of application of the load/moment.
c) Does the solution improve if more than one element is used to discretize each member of the
frame.

Figure 1: portal Frame

Solution:

Assumptions used for the finite element program

Material and section properties:
Following material and sectional properties are used in the program:
Elastic Modulous, E=1
Cross-sectional area, A=1
Length of each element, L=1

Loading and boundary conditions:

Frame is fixed at two location, as shown in the figure 1. And an unit load is applied at the center of
the frame.

Unit system: No specific unit system is used for this problem, as all the inputs to the program are
considered as unity.

ASSIGNMENT -1 ME 5130 - FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Strategy followed for the finite element program:

The program is divided into three sections :
1) Pre-processing: At this stage the frame is discretized into elements, typically the problem is
solved using 1 element per frame member. Then nodes and elements were defined, node
definition includes providing the coordinates of each node. There are 5 nodes and 4
elements to start with.
Next stiffness, force and displacement matrices are initialized with zero values, the stiffness
matrix is of the size 3*number of nodes X 3*number of nodes. Also based on the boundary
conditions the active number of degrees of freedom are calculated.
Next The values of A,E, and I are defined, local stiffness matric is defined. The local
stiffness matrix for the frame is combination of the stiffness matrix of beam and bar.
Since the members of frame are at angles to each other, coordinate transformation is
required to calculate the global stiffness, displacement and force matrices.

2) Processing : Global stiffness matrix is assembled from local stiffness matrices, boundary
conditions are applied, loads are applied and displacement matrix is calculated.

3) Post-processing: The results from the finite element program i.e. displacement and
rotations at each node is presented.

4) Verification of the results: At first the calculation is performed considerint the complete
frame, the displacement and rotation are as given below:

Figure 2: Displacement and Rotations of the portal frame Application of force

ASSIGNMENT -1 ME 5130 - FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Figure 3: Displacement and Rotations of the portal frame with symmetric boundary conditions.

From figure 2 & 3 it can be observed that the deformations and rotations of the frame remain
unchanged if symmetric boundary conditions are used. Next each frame member was divided into 2
elements to study the effect of increasing number of elements on the results, figure 4 shows the
results from the FEM program with 2 elements per member of frame. And it can be observed from
the results that the deformations and rotations are unchanged with increase in the number of
elements.
Figure 5 shows the results when force is replaced with a moment.











Figure 4: Displacement and Rotations of the portal frame with 2 elements per frame member

3

ASSIGNMENT -1 ME 5130 - FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS

Figure 5: Displacement and Rotations of the portal frame Application of moment, M3=+1 unit

Analysis of run time for the program:
Case 1 : Full frame, one element per member = 0.2783 secs
Case 2 : Half symmetric frame, one element per member = 0.2676 secs
Case 3: Full frame, two element per member = 0.3485 sec

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