A COMPUTERIZED METHOD FOR RIGID-PLASTIC YIELD-LINE ANALYSIS OF SLABS

A semi-automatic method is presented for the rigid-plastic yield-line analysis of slabs of to predict the mechanisms which are most likely t o cause collapse. The computational technique adopted used linear prog ramming to evaluate the Munro and Da Fonseca solution for any given tr ial element geometry and non-linear optimisation techniques to investi gate the effect of adjusting the geometry. Linearized constraint equat ions are developed analytically and used with the conjugate gradient m ethod in order to overcome problems due to the existence of discontinu ities in slope of the optimising function. Computation procedures are given and an algorithm for this is described with examples. (C) 1998 P ublished by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.