Comparison between two geometrical nonlinear methods for truss analyses

This paper presents a comparison between two different procedures to deal with the geometric nonlinear analysis of space trusses, considering its structural stability aspects. The first nonlinear formulation, called positional, uses nodal positions rather than nodal displacements to describe the finite elements kinematics. The strains are computed directly from the proposed position concept, using a Cartesian coordinate system fixed in space. The second formulation, called corotational, is based on the explicit separation between rigid body motion and deformed motion. The numerical examples demonstrate the performances and the convergence of the responses for both analyzed formulations. Two numerical examples were compared, including a lattice beam with postcritical behavior. Despite the two completely different approaches to deal with the geometrical nonlinear problem, the results present good agreement.