Out-of-plane deflection of nonprismatic curved beam structures solved by DQEM

The differential quadrature element method (DQEM) is used to solve the out-of-plane deflections of nonprismatic curved beam structures. The extended differential quadrature is used to discretize the governing differential equations defined on all elements, the transition conditions defined on the inter-element boundary of two adjacent elements and the boundary conditions. Numerical results obtained by DQEM are presented. They demonstrate the developed numerical solution procedure.