03ME 7073

Finite Element Method For Thermal Engineering

Lecture 3
 Weighted Residual Integral

Weighted Residual
Evaluation of the Integral
Evaluation of the Integral
Evaluation of the Integral
Evaluation of the Integral
Evaluation of the Integral
 Direct Stiffness Method
After the evaluation of element stiffness matrix and element force
vector for all the elements, these quantities need to be
" assembled " to get the global stiffness matrix and global force
vector

As an example, consider the mesh of 6 elements (N = 6) and 7 nodes, shown in Fig

 Let

be the element stiffness matrix and the element force vector of the

elements =1,2,3,4,5,6 Consider the element 1, i.e. . Note that

the expanded matrix and the expanded vector

 It can easily be verified that, for the 3 rd element the expanded
matrix and the expanded vector are:

Similarly, we obtain the expanded versions of the element stiffness

matrix and the element force vector for the remaining elements, i.e. for =
2,3,4,5,6.
 After the evaluation of element stiffness matrix and element force
vector for all the elements, these quantities need to be assembled to
get global stiffness matrix and global force matrix as shown below.
Element Matrices