Choosing a beam element

Abaqus offers a wide range of beam elements, including “Euler-Bernoulli”-type beams and “Timoshenko”-type beams with solid, thin-walled closed and thin-walled open sections.

The Abaqus/Standard beam element library includes:

  • Euler-Bernoulli (slender) beams in a plane and in space;

  • Timoshenko (shear flexible) beams in a plane and in space;

  • linear, quadratic, and cubic interpolation formulations;

  • warping (open section) beams;

  • pipe elements; and

  • hybrid formulation beams, typically used for very stiff beams that rotate significantly (applications in robotics or in very flexible structures such as offshore pipelines).

The Abaqus/Explicit beam element library includes:

  • Timoshenko (shear flexible) beams in a plane and in space;

  • linear and quadratic interpolation formulations; and

  • linear pipe elements.

The following topics are discussed:

Related Topics
About beam modeling
Beam element library
In Other Guides
*TRANSVERSE SHEAR STIFFNESS
Creating beam sections

ProductsAbaqus/StandardAbaqus/ExplicitAbaqus/CAE