STATIC ANALYSIS OF FRAME STRUCTURES BY THE DIFFERENTIAL QUADRATURE ELEMENT METHOD

In this paper a new version of Di¤erential Quadrature Method (DQM) is proposed and then extended to analyse frame structures. The new method, called the Di¤erential Quadrature Element Method (DQEM), retains all advantages of the earlier version of the di¤erential quadrature method and overcomes some critical shortcomings existing in the original DQM. The proposed method is, however, di¤erent from the Quadrature Element Method (QEM) proposed earlier by Striz et al.1 The methodology is explained in details herein via a di¤erential quadrature beam element and some numerical examples are given to show the e¦ciency of the present method