T-spline FEA for trimmed NURBS surface

Abstract

In this present work, spline FEA for the trimmed NURBS surface of the 2D linear elasticity problem is presented. The main benefit of the proposed method is that no additional efforts for modeling of trimmed NURBS surfaces are needed and the information of the trimming curves and trimmed surfaces exported from the CAD system can be directly used for analysis. For this, trimmed elements are searched by using NURBS projection scheme. The integration of the trimmed elements is performed by using the NURBS-enhanced integration scheme. The formulation of constructing stiffness matrix of trimmed elements is presented. In this formulation, the information of the trimming curve is used for calculating the Jacobian as well as for obtaining integration points. The robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method are investigated through various numerical examples.