ON RECOVERY OF STRESSES FOR A MULTI‐LAYERED BEAM ELEMENT

The stress recovery procedures discussed in the present paper refer to a multi‐layered element of assembled Timoshenko beam elements. Directly calculated stresses for a multi‐layered beam model strongly depend on properties of the approximation functions, and are unrealistic. Thus, an enhanced procedure which circumvents the limitations of the interface variables model, and hierarchical model is proposed. Each material layer of the beam element is covered by one quadrilateral 9‐node element, providing a parabolic approximation of displacements. The stresses are evaluated using 2 × 2 Gauss points, projected to corner nodes, and smoothed within material layers. Numerical calculations show very good accordance of stresses yielded by this procedure with 2D results.