Thin-Walled Beams Research and Development

An integrated warped FEM beam element has been implemented in LS-DYNA and is considered here as a very important beginning. Accounting for warping is a fundamental part of Thin-walled beam theory, having more than three quarters of century history of research and developments, which are still active. Information related to thin- walled beams looks to be very useful to LS-DYNA users, may define steps for further beam FEM elements implementations and wider usage, and therefore some of the information is presented in this paper. The principal idea of the Thin-walled beam theory to represent three-dimensional thin-walled cylindrical shell structures as one- dimensional thin-walled warping beams was very useful in the past and very important today taking advantage of that beams computational efficiency. So far, however, thin-walled beams are modeled mostly using shell FEM elements, which is computationally more expensive