THE INFLUENCE OF AXIAL DISPLACEMENT ON THE ANALYSIS OF FRAMED STRUCTURES

Author: Hanan Suleiman Nimry

Supervisor: Musa Resheidat

Date Of Defense: 1990

ABSTRACT

The structural analysis of plane frames where arbitral selection of axial constrains imposed on frame members is introduced, utilizing the method of coordinate transformation, to the direct stiffness method to set up the solution for the constrained case directly.

The axial strains in frame members are omitted by imposing axial constraints. The solution for some of the unknown joint translations in terms of others could be performed using the constraint conditions. Accordingly, the number of simultaneous equations to be solved is reduced by the other of the constraint matrix.

The formulations of the modified direct stiffness method as developed in this study is coded by a FORTRAN 77 program to handle all the numerical computations. The main features of the program in addition to its basic function of classical computations, the facilities of automatic numbering as well as identification of redundant members have been incorporated.

The method of analysis proved superiority and also accuracy of results over other approaches known in the literature. Small and large problems were considered. The axial strains may be omitted in beams to achieve compatibility between design and analysis without significance loss of accuracy. The same analogy is applied to columns where the axial strains should not be discarded.

This study may trigger further research and development of solutions for space frames and dynamic analysis as well.