DERIVATION OF SHAPE FUNCTIONS FOR AN EXACT 4-DOF TIMOSHENKO BEAM ELEMENT

Timoshenko beam elements have been the subject of numerous publications. The difficulty was that of arriving at a superconvergent element with four degrees of freedom, as is the case for the Bernuli-Euler classical beam element. Two different approaches are presented here for the derivation of the shape functions. The first is based on the flexibility matrix, where utilizing the unit load method, including the term that accounts for the shear deformations in the virtual work expression, the stiffness matrix is derived. Then, a second method is presented to derive the exact shape functions, directly from the differential equations of the Timoshenko beam theory. The resulting shape functions are the same in both methods.