A Simplified Quadrature Element Method to compute the natural frequencies of multispan beams and frame structures

Abstract

In this paper a new version of the Modified Quadrature Element Method (MQEM) is proposed. Like MQEM, the proposed method overcomes the drawback of the distance δ of the Quadrature Element Method (QEM) without introducing further degrees of freedom at the ends of the element as in the Differential Quadrature Element Method (DQEM), but it makes the computational cost of the stiffness matrix (and the mass matrix) lighter and uses a general procedure to generate the sampling points distribution. The method here presented has been applied to compute the fundamental frequencies of some structures.