Shakedown analysis of civil engineering structural elements

Abstract

The determination of safety margins for civil engineering structures under varying loadings is a major issue for modern engineering design. Direct methods and particularly shakedown analysis is the only suitable tool for this issue. This paper aims to propose the recently developed direct method, that was named RSDM-S, for the shakedown analysis of civil engineering structural elements. The method is an iterative procedure, which with the aid of the decomposition of the residual stress field into Fourier series, shrinks the load domain until the residual stresses become constant in time. The method is formulated within the finite-element method and is applied to two-dimensional elasto-plastic structural elements under cyclic mechanical loadings.