Vibration analysis of a new curved beam element

The common practice in developing a locking-free curved beam element is to ensure that its interpolation functions of displacement explicitly satisfy the inextensible bending mode condition for the membrane locking-free instead of the rigid body modes. In this paper, we study the impact of this practice on the dynamic characteristics of a finite element by conducting vibration analysis using our newly developed three-node locking-free curved beam element. In this case, the inextensible bending mode condition is satisfied explicitly, while the rigid body modes are satisfied implicitly to 4th-order accuracy. Numerical and experimental examples show that with the newly developed curved beam element, developed by using the implicit representation of a rigid body mode condition, it is possible to recover the rigid body modes of curved beams with low and medium slenderness ratios. This is even true for cases involving a half-circular element and the vibration of the curved beam is predicted with high accuracy.(c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.