An effective composite laminated curved beam element

In this study, we present a new highly accurate composite laminated hybrid-mixed curved beam element. The present element, which is based on the Hellinger-Reissner variational principle and the first-order shear deformation lamination theory, employs consistent stress parameters corresponding to cubic displacement polynomials with additional nodeless degrees of freedom in order to resolve the numerical difficulties due to the spurious constraints. The stress parameters are eliminated and the nodeless degrees are condensed out to obtain the (6 x 6) element stiffness matrix. Several numerical examples confirm the superior behaviour of the present hybrid-mixed laminated curved beam element. Copyright (c) 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.