Abstract
An investigation is conducted on the performance of the curved isoparametric cubic beam element for analysing vibrational behaviour of coil springs. Firstly, the results of full and uniformly reduced integration are compared for three static problems. Uniformly reduced integration is shown to yield surprising accuracy, even for curved and pretwisted beams. In the latter case of a shear loaded cantilever beam, exact internal force values are obtained. Since element geometry is described by nodal co-ordinates and cross-sectional orientation only, the element proves to be ideal for modelling both helical and non-helical sections of coil springs. In addition, the formulation is easy to implement and simpler than those of previous ‘helical spring elements’. It is shown that accurate values for modal frequencies can be obtained with relatively coarse meshes.
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