About Beams

A beam is a slender structure that can be fully described by its cross-section properties such as area, moments of inertia, and torsional constant. Beams are the choice for modeling reinforcements in 3D solids and shell structures, as well as in 2D solids under the plane stress assumption. Naturally, they can also model latticeworks, both planar and three-dimensional.

Beams can sustain forces and moments in any direction, both distributed and on individual nodes. The beam’s ends and interconnections can be free, simply supported, or clamped. In fact, the simplified boundary conditions are usually responsible for most of the difference that can be found between a beam solution and a full 3D solid simulation of the same structure. Point constraints on beams are well-behaved, in contrast to the solid case, and it is possible to use discrete point masses and mass moments of inertia.

The Beam interface is based on the principle of virtual work. The resulting equation can equivalently be viewed as a weak formulation of an underlying PDE. The Beam interface uses special shape function classes to define stresses and strains in the beams using either Euler-Bernoulli or Timoshenko theory.