Development of a Rigid- Ended beam Element and a Simplified 3-Dimensional Analysis Method for Ship Structures

In this paper, a 2-dimensional novel beam element is developed and a method to replace the 3-dimensional analysis with 2-dimensional analysis is proposed. The developed novel beam element named rigid-ended beam element can consider the effect of three kinds of span points within one element, which was impossible in modeling with the ordinary beam element. Calculated results for the portal frame using the rigid-ended beam element agree with the results using membrane element. And also, the proposed simplified 3- dimensional analysis method which includes two step analysis using influence coefficients shows good accuracy. Structural analysis using the rigid-ended beam element and the simplified 3-dimensional method is revealed to have good computing efficiency due to unnecessity of the elements corresponding to the brackets and simplification of 3-dimensional analysis.