A Beam Finite Element Model for Efficient Analysis of Wire Strands

Abstract

A beam finite element model (FEM) for efficient analysis of the mechanical behavior of wire strands is presented. Two-noded elasticplastic beam elements were used for wire discretization. Hertz contact theory was implemented via newly developed node-to-node compression-only contact element to simulate the wire-to-wire contacts. The first numerical example demonstrated is the analysis of a three layered 19-wire strand under axial tensile load. The results showed excellent agreement with those obtained from the accurate full three-dimensional solid FEM of Jiang et al. The degrees of freedom for the beam FEM is only about 4% of the solid FEM. The second verification example presented is the simulation of a six-layered 91-wire strand under axial tensile load. For the global behavior of the strand, the finite element results showed better agreement with the experimental data than Costello's elasticity theory. For this multilayered strand, it could be extremely hard to implement an accurate full three-dimensional solid FEM.