Abstract:
This research presents a frontal solver microcomputer programme for analysis of plane frame structures. The programme is written in BASIC (Applesoft BASIC). The frontal process assembles coefficients of member stiffness matrices and load vectors, and simultaneously reduces those degrees of freedom of nodes which are unconnected with nodes of members not yet assembled by Gauss elimination. The frontal method requires minimum RAM storage because most of the data are saved on diskette. Therefore the method can be used to analyze structures that have many nodes. The results obtained are displacements at nodes (ie. translation in X and Y directions and rotation about z axis) and member forces (ie. axial force, shear force and moment). From four studied examples which consist of small and large structures, the results showed good agreement with the results using a mainframe computer and other results. The computed solution error was small, increasing as the size of the structure becomes larger but remains within acceptable limits. The frontal method has the dis-advantage that when used on a microcomputer to analyze small structures, it requires large solution time compared with matrix methods that store stiffness coefficients and load vectors in the high-speed memory because the frontal method demands relatively large amount of data transfer to and from diskette. The method is therefore suited to analysis of large structures, for which the global stiffness matrix and load vectors cannot be contained in the high-speed memory. This study has indicated that negligible solution error results from use of the frontal method and that the method could advantageously be used to analyze large structures. It can therefore be concluded that the technique and the developed computer programme may effectively be used for designing plane frame structures by the microcomputer.