Design and application of a new tapered superelement for analysis of revolving geometries

Structures of tapered geometry are customarily used in a variety of applications. The analysis of such structures is usually made through finite element method using traditional beam, shell or brick elements. In this paper, a new tapered superelement is presented that lends itself to modeling revolving geometries under lateral, axial and torsional loads. The presented tapered superelement has 16 nodes. The performance of this element under static and dynamic loading and in rotating condition is examined. It is shown that this element yields accurate results with higher computational efficiency compared to conventional elements. Furthermore, it is verified that a single tapered superelement may be used instead of 32 or more conventional brick or shell elements with the same order of accuracy. Moreover, it is shown that the use of beam elements with tapered geometry may result in inaccurate results. It is concluded that the use of the proposed superelement offers accurate results at lower computational cost for any revolving geometries.