Example 4 : Bending of a cantilevered beam

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Bending of a cantilevered beam

Application of the Principle of Virtual Work

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The virtual work done by the external applied forces in moving through the virtual displacement   is given by

 

The work done by the internal forces are,

 

From beam theory, the displacement field at a point in the beam is given by

 

The strains are, neglecting Poisson effects,

 

and the corresponding stresses are

 

If we also neglect the shear strains and stresses, we get

 

Therefore, from the principle of virtual work,

 

Integrating by parts and after some manipulation, we get,

 

where   is the Dirac delta function,

 

The Euler equation for the beam is, therefore,

 

and the boundary conditions are

 


Application of the Hellinger-Prange-Reissner variational principle

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The governing equations of the cantilever beam can be written as

Kinematics

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Constitutive Equation

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Equilibrium (kinetics)

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Recall that the Hellinger-Prange-Reissner functional is given by

 

If we apply the strain-displacement constraints using the Lagrange multipliers   and the displacement boundary conditions using the Lagrange multipliers  , we get a modified functional

 

For the cantilevered beam, the above functional becomes

 

Taking the first variation of the functional, we can easily derive the Euler equations and the associated BCs.

 

and

 

The same process can be used to derive Euler equations using the Hu-Washizu variational principle.