Three-dimensional nonlinear displacement-based beam element for members with angle and tee sections

Abstract

Asymmetric thin-walled sections such as steel angles and tees are widely used in a range of steel structures. To address extreme limit states that these structures encounter due to extreme events such as hurricanes and earthquakes, it is important to capture their response due to large deformations caused by static or dynamic loading. In the nonlinear large deformation regime, these members have coupled axial-flexural–torsional deformation due to the so-called Wagner effect and the noncoincident shear center and centroid. A three-dimensional corotational total Lagrangian beam element is formulated and implemented in the OpenSees corotational framework to account for these coupling effects by invoking Green-Lagrange strains referenced to a basic system. In the basic system, shear forces and torque are defined with respect to the shear center, axial force is referred to the centroid, and flexure is defined around the section principle axes but in the planes containing the shear center. The element tangent stiffness matrix is derived through linearization of the governing equation obtained from the principle of virtual work. Cubic Hermitian functions for the transverse displacements and a linear shape function for the axial and torsional deformation are adopted in the development. Before conducting the corotational transformation, all element end forces and displacements are transformed to act about the shear center. In order to remedy membrane locking in the inextensional bending mode, the high order bending terms in the axial strain are replaced by a constant effective strain. Cyclic material nonlinearity is considered by discretizing the cross section into a grid of fibers, tracking the steel uniaxial stress–strain constitutive at each fiber, and performing numerical integration over the cross section to obtain the section stiffness matrix. The formulation is compared against a set of experimental and numerical results to validate that the element can model geometric and material nonlinearities accurately and efficiently.