A novel formulation of material nonlinear analysis in structural mechanics

This article demonstrates a novel approach for material nonlinear analysis. This analysis procedure eliminates tedious and lengthy step by step incremental and then iterative procedure adopted classically and gives direct results in the linear as well as in nonlinear range of the material behavior. Use of elastic moduli is eliminated. Instead, stress and strain functions are used as the material input in the analysis procedure. These stress and strain functions are directly derived from the stress-strain behavior of the material by the method of curve fitting. This way, the whole stress-strain diagram is utilized in the analysis which naturally exposes the response of structure when loading is in nonlinear range of the material behavior. It is found that it is an excellent computational procedure adopted so far for material nonlinear analysis which gives very accurate results, easy to adopt and simple in calculations. The method eliminates all types of linearity assumptions in basic derivations of equations and hence, eliminates all types of possibility of errors in the analysis procedure as well. As it is required to know stress distribution in the structural body by proper modelling and structural idealization, the proposed analysis approach can be regarded as stress-based analysis procedure. Basic problems such as uniaxial problem, beam bending, and torsion problems are solved. It is found that approach is very suitable for solving the problems of fracture mechanics. Energy release rate for plate with center crack and double cantilever beam specimen is also evaluated. The approach solves the fracture problem with relative ease in strength of material style calculations. For all problems, results are compared with the classical displacement-based liner theory.