Inelastic Analysis of Structures Based on Stress Redistribution

Abstract

An important characteristic of structures that exhibit material nonlinearity is that the internal stresses are redistributed when the stiffness properties of the members change. Based on this physical characteristic of structures, an efficient analytical method for the nonlinear analysis of structures is presented here. In his analytical method, the overall response of the structure is determined by considering: (1) The elastic response of the structure to external loads; and (2) the stress redistribution that results from the member yield excursions. One advantage of this method is that the stress redistribution may be represented in terms of the elastic stiffness matrix of the structure and not the tangent stiffness matrix. Another advantage of this method is that the only parameters that have to be evaluated and updated throughout the analysis are the member stresses and the member deformations. Hence, there is no direct evaluation of the structure displacements or the tangent stiffness matrices.