Non-prismatic beam stiffness mass matrices?

[Son_new]

Hi,

How to obtain the mass and stiffness matrices for non prismatic beam element? Generally FEM books suggest to discretize the  varying section ( linearly, parabolically, etcc) by splitting it to the reasonable number of constant sections. But I don't feel like it's a engineeringly decent way of solving the problem.

Your comments will be appreciated

Regards,

[Son_new]

Any suggestion please!

[FEAP_Admin]

Why not just compute the integrals exactly for your given prismatic variation?

You should be aware though that you may be fooling yourself -- especially if you are using a Bernoulli-Euler (BE) theory.
BE theory presumes that you have a prismatic section!