Investigation of an iterative sub-structure method for elastic and elastic–plastic framework analysis

This paper investigates the viability of an iterative sub-structure method for elastic and elastic–plastic framework analysis. The motivation is the prohibitive model sizes required for brick element analyses of large, three-dimensional frameworks, which require detailed non-linear material and geometry response at the joints but only linear behaviour in between. The rationale adopted is to investigate the viability of the approach for some simple plane frameworks, which can be easily validated against global brick element models. Future work will address extension to more realistic three-dimensional space frames.