Authors: J. M. C. Estêvão, A. Carreira

The determination of analytical solutions of continuous dynamic systems presents a great complexity. Practical problems usually involve a discretization process with higher or lower number of degrees of freedom. In this discrete problems mass is concentrated in a different number of nodes. However, the discretization process implies solutions which are only an approximation of the exact ones, because mass is continuously distributed. The minimum number of degrees of freedom used in discrete problems is dependent on the nature of the problem and on the adopted structural analysis method. The fibre contact element method (CFEM) is a new structural analysis method which can be used for the analysis of continuous dynamic systems, because it uses micro-models. To better understand the capacity of the method in terms of the obtained results, a comparison between experimental and CFEM results was carried out. Obtained results seem to indicate that experimental and numerical results of this new method are very close.

J. M. C. Estêvão¹ | A. Carreira¹
1 Departamento de Engenharia Civil, ISE, Universidade do Algarve