Large Displacement, Nonlinear Transient Analysis by Finite Elements

A method is presented for the transient analysis of structures including nonlinearities in material behavior and geometry. A system of rigid convected (or corotational) coordinates that rotate and translate with each element is used to simplify the governing equations so that an efficient computer code could be developed. For purposes of applying the method to problems with moderately large relative rotations within an element, this paper introduces additional terms to account for these variations of the rotation. Results are presented for a variety of elastic and elastic-plastic problems.