A NEW BLOCK TRI-DIAGONAL STIFFNESS MATRIX FOR EFFICIENT FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF STRUCTURES

In this paper, a new canonical form is introduced for efficient analysis of structures with special geometric properties. Using the properties of this matrix, the number of operations needed for the matrix inversion is considerably reduced employing the decomposition of the block stiffness matrices. The condition for applicability of the presented method is also discussed. For the previously developed canonical forms, the Kronecker products and the corresponding theorems could be used for certain class of repeated structures. Here this class is extended to the stiffness matrices having more general block tri-diagonal form where the diagonal blocks are not necessarily identical, requiring a different treatment. Two examples of finite element models are analyzed to illustrate the efficiency of the presented method.