Finite Element Method with Applications in Engineering

4.1 INTRODUCTION

Most conventional methods are cumbersome, uneconomical and time consuming to apply to many engineering applications, due to introduction of new materials such as composites, fibre reinforced materials etc. and complicated geometries to be modelled. FEM has become one of the most popular numerical methods to deal with complex geometries and material properties with the availability of high speed digital computers. Generally, FEM can be considered as a variant of Rayleigh–Ritz method in combination with the variational principle applied to continuum mechanics. In the Rayleigh–Ritz method, trial functions are used to represent the entire domain. On the other hand, the trial functions used in FEM are approximated over a sub-domain, ...