A Component-Wise Approach in Structural Analysis

Many engineering structures can be seen as multicomponent structures. Typical examples of such structures are aircraft wings and fibre-reinforced composites. The former are typically composed of skins, spars, stringers and ribs. The latter are composed by plies made of fibres and matrices. Models built by means of an arbitrary combination of different components lead to a component-wise (CW) analysis. The present chapter presents an innovative CW approach based on the one-dimensional Carrera unified formulation (CUF). The CUF has been developed recently, different classes of models are available and, in this work, Taylor-like (TE) and Lagrange-like (LE) elements were adopted. Different numerical examples are proposed, including aircraft structures, composite laminates and typical buildings from civil engineering. Comparisons with results from solid and shell finite elements are given. It is concluded that the present CW approach represents a reliable and computationally cheap tool which can be exploited for many types of structural analyses.