A COROTATIONAL FORMULATION FOR GEOMETRICALLY NONLINEAR FINITE-ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF SPATIAL BEAMS

co-rotational procedure is presented in this paper for handling arbitrarily large three-dimensional rotations associated with geometrically nonlinear analysis of spatial beam structures. This procedure has been incorporated into two commonly used 3-D beam elements, the 2-node cubic beam element and the 3-node superparametric beam element, in our in-house general purpose finite element program, VAST. In the present procedure, the element tangent stiffness matrices are generated by using the standard updated Lagrangian formulation, while a co-rotational formulation is employed to update the internal force vectors during the Newton-Raphson iterations. A number of example problems have been analyzed and the result are in good agreement with analytical or published numerical solutions.