Gasturbines@SNU

  We are developing efficient structural finite elements (beams, plates and shells) that can model complex and highly nonlinear behaviors of functionally graded, composite structures with arbitrary cross-section shapes and material compositions. Key challenges are how to model the warping and distortion coupled to other deformation modes due to smoothly varying material properties accurately and efficiently. While layer-by-layer discretization using three-dimensional solid elements can approximate the spatial variation of material properties, it may require a large number of layers leading to prohibitively expensive computational cost. To address this issue, we propose the use of structural finite elements developed based on a new variational formulation and its finite element solution procedure that can capture the key structural behaviors with a greatly reduced number of degrees of freedom.