Out-of-plane responses of a circular curved Timoshenko beam due to a moving load

For the cases of using the finite curved beam elements and taking the effects of both the shear deformation and rotary inertias into consideration, the literature regarding either free or forced vibration analysis of the curved beams is rare. Thus, this paper tries to determine the dynamic responses of a circular curved Timoshenko beam due to a moving load using the curved beam elements. By taking account of the effect of shear deformation and that of rotary inertias due to bending and torsional vibrations, the stiffness matrix and the mass matrix of the curved beam element were obtained from the force–displacement relations and the kinetic energy equations, respectively. Since all the element property matrices for the curved beam element are derived based on the local polar coordinate system (rather than the local Cartesian one), their coefficients are invariant for any curved beam element with constant radius of curvature and subtended angle and one does not need to transform the property matrices of each curved beam element from the local coordinate system to the global one to achieve the overall property matrices for the entire curved beam structure before they are assembled. The availability of the presented approach has been verified by both the existing analytical solutions for the entire continuum curved beam and the numerical solutions for the entire discretized curved beam composed of the conventional straight beam elements based on either the consistent-mass model or the lumped-mass model. In addition to the typical circular curved beams, a hybrid curved beam composed of one curved-beam segment and two identical straight-beam segments subjected to a moving load was also studied. Influence on the dynamic responses of the curved beams of the slenderness ratio, moving-load speed, shear deformation and rotary inertias was investigated.