A tapered beam finite element for rotor dynamics analysis

The stiffness, mass and gyroscopic matrices of a rotating beam element are developed, a cubic function being used for the transverse displacement. Shear deflection is included by use of end nodal variables of shear strain, along with transverse displacement and cross-section rotation; rotatory inertia effects are included in the energy functional to provide a Timoshenko beam formulation. The gyroscopic effects for small perturbations are linearized as a skew symmetric damping matrix. The formulation is implemented by numerical integration for a linearly tapered circular beam. A technique of reduction of the shear nodal variable prior to global assembly is shown to provide little loss in accuracy with reduced system bandwidth. Numerical comparisons for three previously published beam models are included, with results presented for the case of forward and reverse precession to verify the gyroscopic effects. The utility of the element in a general program for rotor dynamics analysis is identified.