Beam and Truss Finite Element Verification for DYNA3D

Abstract

The explicit finite element (FE) software program DYNA3D has been developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to simulate the dynamic behavior of structures, systems, and components. This report focuses on verification of beam and truss element formulations in DYNA3D. An efficient protocol has been developed to verify the accuracy of these structural elements by generating a set of representative problems for which closed-form quasi-static steady-state analytical reference solutions exist. To provide as complete coverage as practically achievable, problem sets are developed for each beam and truss element formulation (and their variants) in all modes of loading and physical orientation. Analyses with loading in the elastic and elastic-plastic regimes are performed. For elastic loading, the FE results are within 1% of the reference solutions for all cases. For beam element bending and torsion loading in the plastic regime, the response is heavily dependent on the numerical integration rule chosen, with higher refinement yielding greater accuracy (agreement to within 1%). Axial loading in the plastic regime produces accurate results (agreement to within 0.01%) for all integration rules and element formulations. Truss elements are also verified to provide accurate results (within 0.01%) for elastic and elastic-plastic loading. A sample problem to verify beam element response in ParaDyn, the parallel version DYNA3D, is also presented.