Nonprismatic beam modeling is an important issue in structural engineering, not only for versatile applicability the tapered beams do have in engineering structures, but also for their unique potential to simulate different kinds of material or geometrical variations such as crack appearing or spreading of plasticity along the beam. In this paper, a new procedure is proposed to find the exact shape functions and stiffness matrices of nonprismatic beam elements for the Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko formulations. The variations dealt with here include both tapering and abrupt jumps in section parameters along the beam element. The proposed procedure has found a simple structure, due to two special approaches: The separation of rigid body motions, which do not store strain energy, from other strain states, which store strain energy, and finding strain interpolating functions rather than the shape functions which suffer complex representation. Strain interpolating functions involve low-order polynomials and can suitably track the variations along the beam element. The proposed procedure is implemented to model non-prismatic Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam elements, and is verified by different numerical examples.

Keywords