STRAIN ENERGY EVALUATION IN STRUCTURES HAVING ZONE-WISE PHYSICAL- MECHANICAL QUANTITIES

Among the possible aims of structural analysis inside some engineering spheres it can be useful to know the strain energy stored in all or in a part of the structure caused by assigned external actions, like the boundary and domain quantities. This serves to evaluate globally whether an assigned portion of structure undergoes an excessive store of energy able to compromise the stability of all the structure. This evaluation can be carried out through boundary work obtained using appropriate boundary generalized quantities connected to the results of the analysis on the whole structure. The advantage consists in using a very restricted number of quantities which, because of the characteristics of the method, are only evaluated on the boundary. Some strategies used to evaluate the error made are introduced through the computation of the external direct work and of the reciprocal works involving quantities only connected to the boundary of the complementary domain and quantities connected to either the real boundary of the structure or the boundary of its complementary domain. A reduction of this error is suggested.