Sec. 1.

3]

The finite element enigma

1
Introduction

1.1 BASIC TERMINOLOGY

Simple engineering notations are adopted in this book, and tensorial expressions
have been avoided. Many parameters presented in this book may be referred to as
vectors, or matrices.
A vector is a column matrix, which may be written
horizontally between braces, for example:
a1
a
a = a1 a2 ... an 2
...

an
which represents a vector or a column matrix of order n x 1.
To avoid any
confusion, row matrices are expressed in square brackets, or in terms of a transposed
vector; that is,

a1

a2

... an a t

is a row matrix of order 1 x n.

A scalar quantity defined as follows:

Sec. 1.4]

Basic terminology

s = a i bi
i =1

may be written in the following equivalent matrix form:

s = at b b t a

where

b = b1 b2 ... bn

A matrix A of order m n has m rows and n columns, and may be expressed

explicitly as follows:
A11 A12 ...
A1 n

A21 A22 ...

A2 n

A=
...
...
...
...

Am 1
...
Am 2
Am n
and if m = n the matrix is known as a square matrix, which has a determinant
expressed as | A | . A square matrix is singular if the value of its determinant is
zero. A diagonal matrix of order n may be written in the following equivalent forms:
where
D11 0 ... 0
0 D
... 0
22

D=
D11 D22 ... Dn n
...
... ... ...

0 ... Dn n
0
If D11 = D 22 = = D n n = 1 , then the matrix D is a unit matrix of order n, and is
usually written as In. Null matrices or vectors, i.e. those with zero elements will be
denoted by: O.
Some parameters such as stresses and strains have different ways of
representation. The bold letters: , denote the engineering representation of stress
and strain vectors, or column matrices, whilst , will be employed to represent
stress and strain 3 x 3 matrices.