Motives for better Engineering
Explore horizontal earth pressure,
Coulomb's theory, and its applications.
Compare geotechnical results and
understand the trial wedge method's nuances.
Explore the technical content on vessel collision
to calculate the annual frequency of bridge component collapse.
Introducing the concept of seismic isolation design.
See moreThe scary part of FEM is sometimes FEM gives wrong results without any error message. The analysis may be meaningless if an engineer cannot check or interpret the results. Let’s consider a simple example similar to the case from Dr. Gallagher (Finite Element Analysis: Fundamentals, 1975).
For the previous example, we can use high-order triangular elements. This element has six nodes per element and assumes the displacement is quadratic within an element. Also, each side edge can be curved, as shown.
Continuing on to the third part of this multi-part blog, another option is a quadrilateral element. As always, let’s start with an example.