A force field superposition approach to plane elastic stress and strain analysis

Abstract

The force field superposition method for linear elastic problems of stress and strain analysis involves representing the stress and displacement fields in a given solution domain as a superposition of fields generated by a number of point forces. These forces are located outside the solution domain, and in the case of two-dimensional, singly connected finite domain problems can be uniformly distributed around the perimeter of a circle enclosing the physical domain. Doubly connected and infinite domain problems can also be treated. The results of some simple test problems show that remarkable accuracy can be achieved with very little computational effort relative to other numerical methods. More complex problems require the solution domain to be divided into several subdomains, each of which may be subjected to superposition analysis.