Department of Mechanics and Materials
Basic mathematical formulation of the Finite Element Method. Direct Stiffness Method used in structural mechanics. Evaluation of stiffness matrices for the basic elements using variational principles. Element formulation (bar and beam elements, CST, LST, quadrilateral, tetrahedral and brick elements). Natural coordinates, natural shape functions and isoparametric representation. Numerical integration. Introduction to dynamics. FEM programming.
Department of Mechanics and Materials
Basics of the most used numerical methods in structural mechanics. Central difference method, finite element method, boundary element method. Time and spatial discretization schemes. Finite element method - derivation of the basic equations. Stiffness matrix, mass matrix, damping matrix at element level and structural level. Methods for solving systems of algebraic equations. Numerical integration.