CONSISTENCY OF STRAIGHT-BEAM APPROXIMATION OF A THIN-WALLED CIRCULAR BEAM

Practically curved members including circular arches are often analyze d by an approximate method using an assemblage of straight beam elemen ts. Here a stiffness equation of such an assemblage of straight beam e lements is introduced, and it is shown that the discretized equation c onverges to the exact field equation of a thin-walled circular beam as the size of each element becomes infinitesimally small. The stiffness equation with the coupled in-plane and out-of-plane motion can be app lied to arbitrary circular beams with arbitrary radii no matter how de ep they are, as long as the assumptions of the thin-walled curved beam s hold. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd