AUTOMATIC GENERATION OF BENDING ELEMENT MATRICES FOR FINITE ELEMENT METHOD USING REDUCE Available to Purchase

The formation of the well known element mass, geometric stiffness and stiffness matrices based on Hermite polynomials can be very easily automated using Computer Algebra systems. The algebraic language REDUCE has been used to obtain the algebraic expressions for such matrices in one and two dimensions and to automatically produce FORTRAN code. The program developed can derive the matrices for any number of nodes in the element. The aim is to demonstrate how the Computer Algebra system can greatly reduce the effort in forming these classical matrices. It can thus be used as a teaching aid.