An incremental procedure for deformation analysis of elastic-plastic frames.

In the present paper an incremental procedure is formulated for first-order elastoplastic analysis of plane frame structures discretized into a finite number of beam elements and described by piecewise linear elastic-perfectly plastic constitutive laws, under the assumption of both reversible and irreversible behaviour of material and using piecewise linear yield conditions at any desired degree of discretization in the space of the active stress resultants (axial force, shear force and bending moment). The proposed method, by using the independent elastic-plastic kinematical compatibility equations, restrains the problem sizes within not more than twice the number of the redundant unknowns in the complete elastic frame, regardless of the degree of discretization of the piecewise linear yield conditions, still maintaining the advantage exhibited by the Mathematical Programming methods of requiring only one factorization of the matrix governing the problem when no local unloading occurs. Furthermore, the outlined algorithm allows the additional computational effort to be restrained in the case of local unloading, inasmuch as it requires a new factorization to be performed of a part of the matrix governing the problem, whose size is small with respect to the total size of the matrix.