Development of a New Finite Element for the Analysis of Sandwich Beams with Soft Core

A new super convergent sandwich beam finite element formulation is presented in this article. This element is a two-nodded, six degrees of freedom (dof) per node (3 dof u(0), w, phi for top and bottom face sheets each), which assumes that all the axial and flexural loads are taken by face sheets, while the core takes only the shear loads. The beam element is formulated based on first-order shear deformation theory for the face sheets and the core displacements are assumed to vary linearly across the thickness. A number of numerical experiments involving static, free vibration, and wave propagation analysis examples are solved with an aim to show the super convergent property of the formulated element. The examples presented in this article consider both metallic and composite face sheets. The formulated element is verified in most cases with the results available in the published literature.

A study of symbolic processing and computational aspects in helicopter dynamics

Even research models of helicopter dynamics often lead to a large number of equations of motion with periodic coefficients; and Floquet theory is a widely used mathematical tool for dynamic analysis. Presently, three approaches are used in generating the equations of motion. These are (1) general-purpose symbolic processors such as REDUCE and MACSYMA, (2) a special-purpose symbolic processor, DEHIM (Dynamic Equations for Helicopter Interpretive Models), and (3) completely numerical approaches. In this paper, comparative aspects of the first two purely algebraic approaches are studied by applying REDUCE and DEHIM to the same set of problems. These problems range from a linear model with one degree of freedom to a mildly non-linear multi-bladed rotor model with several degrees of freedom. Further, computational issues in applying Floquet theory are also studied, which refer to (1) the equilibrium solution for periodic forced response together with the transition matrix for perturbations about that response and (2) a small number of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the unsymmetric transition matrix. The study showed the following: (1) compared to REDUCE, DEHIM is far more portable and economical, but it is also less user-friendly, particularly during learning phases; (2) the problems of finding the periodic response and eigenvalues are well conditioned.