Large deflection analysis of elastic cantilevers

In the context of this study, structural analysis of an elastic cantilever has been conducted using an iterative method based on Euler-Bernouilli equations. For this purpose, the beam has been considered to be divided into elements of equal length and the rotational angles have been assumed to be linearly changing over these elements in computing the elastic curve. At the beginning, the deformations caused by the loads acting on the structure is determined, and then by application of the loads on the deformed system, the new deflections are re-calculated. This procedure is repeated until stabilization of deflections and rotations. The iterative process has been conducted using MS Excel and also by programming with MATLAB. A user friendly interface is also produced by MATLAB GUI. The deflections are also computed with total potential minimization technique. Results are compared with each other and with computations based on classical methods.