THE FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS FOR LARGE DEFLECTION OF SPACE TRUSSES

In this paper, the tangent stiffness matrices and the secant stiffness matrices of space trusses are derived with the energy principle in the Total Lagrangian coordinates. By means of several approaches, the solution for the geometric nonlinear finite element analysis of space trusses is achieved. The numerical example in this paper shows that the stiffness matrices formulated can be used to analyze geometrically nonlinear problems of space trusses satisfactically.