MODELING OF BEAMS WITH WEB OPENINGS USING THE BOUNDARY ELEMENT METHOD

Resumo

This paper presents an alternative modeling of beams with openings in the web, using the 2D
Boundary Element Method formulation (BEM) to analyze the stress and displacement distributions at internal
points. The material is considered to be elastic linear. A "2D MEC" program was elaborated using Kelvin's
fundamental solution with continuous and discontinuous linear elements for the boundary discretization, including

the openings. The PYTHON programming language was used to develop the computer code, since it’s an open-
source platform. Some examples already evaluated in other scientific works are presented, to test the effectiveness

of the implemented computational code, as well as the formulation used. The results found demonstrate that the
Boundary Element Method, in a simple program, can be inserted in simple practical solutions as usual structural
calculation.