Efficient formulation for dynamics of corotational 2D beams

The corotational method is an attractive approach to derive non-linear finite beam elements. In a number of papers, this method was employed to investigate the non-linear dynamic analysis of 2D beams. However, most of the approaches found in the literature adopted either a lumped mass matrix or linear local interpolations to derive the inertia terms (which gives the classical linear and constant Timoshenko mass matrix), although local cubic interpolations were used to derive the elastic force vector and the tangent stiffness matrix. In this paper, a new corotational formulation for dynamic nonlinear analysis is presented. Cubic interpolations are used to derive both the inertia and elastic terms. Numerical examples show that the proposed approach is more efficient than using lumped or Timoshenko mass matrices.