Geometrically exact beam theory without Euler angles

In modeling highly flexible beams undergoing arbitrary rigid–elastic deformations, difficulties exist in describing large rotations using rotational variables, including three Euler angles, two Euler angles, one principal rotation angle plus three direction cosines of the principal rotation axis, four Euler parameters, three Rodrigues parameters, and three modified Rodrigues parameters. The main problem is that such rotational variables are either sequence-dependent and/or spatially discontinuous because they are not mechanics-based variables. Hence, they are not appropriate for use as nodal degrees of freedom in total-Lagrangian finite-element modeling. Moreover, it is difficult to apply boundary conditions on such discontinuous and/or sequence-dependent rotational variables. This paper presents a new geometrically exact beam theory that uses no rotation variables and has no singular points in the spatial domain. The theory fully accounts for geometric nonlinearities and initial curvatures by using Jaumann strains, exact coordinate transformations, and orthogonal virtual rotations. The derivations are presented in detail, fully nonlinear governing equations and boundary conditions are presented, a finite element formulation is included, and the corresponding governing equations for numerically exact analysis using a multiple shooting method is also derived. Numerical examples are used to illustrate the problems of using rotational variables and to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed geometrically exact displacement-based beam theory.