Copyright © 2010 William Taylor Matias Silva and Luciano Mendes Bezerra. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A new method is presented for first-order elastoplastic analysis of framed structures using a radial return predictor/corrector solution strategy. The proposed method assumes plastic hinge formation coupled with a yield surface. The yield surface is defined as a general function of axial force, shear forces, twisting, and biaxial bending moments on the cross-section of the frame. The material is regarded as linear and elastic-perfect plastic. The plastic deformations are governed by the normality criterion. Combining the Newton-Raphson method and the radial return algorithm, a consistent tangent modular matrix is proposed and fast and converging algorithms are presented. Examples demonstrate the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method.