Converging to Something

Is it better to have converged and lost than never to have converged at all? The displacement-based and force-based frame elements are both distributed plasticity formulations--just one is way better at simulating the spread of plasticity than the other. Despite this fairly well known fact, I still see people use four, five, six, or more … Continue reading Converging to Something →

How to Record Section Curvature

I've seen recently a few people compute curvature for an OpenSees fiber section by dividing the difference between top and bottom uniaxial fiber strains by the distance between the fibers. While there's nothing technically wrong with this approach, it's a lot of work and it's error prone. In addition, this approach implies that using a … Continue reading How to Record Section Curvature →