The behavior of beam elements can be determined by numerical integration of the section or can be given directly in terms of area, moments of inertia, and torsional constant.

When defining beam cross-section properties numerically, you can have the section properties calculated once at the beginning of the analysis (linear elastic material behavior is assumed) or throughout the analysis (linear or nonlinear material behavior is permitted).

ABAQUS includes a number of standard cross-section shapes. Other shapes, provided they are “thin-walled,” can be modeled using the ARBITRARY cross-section.

The orientation of the cross-section must be defined either by specifying a third node or by defining a normal vector as part of the element property definition. The normals can be plotted in the Visualization module of ABAQUS/CAE.

The beam cross-section can be offset from the nodes that define the beam. This procedure is useful in modeling stiffeners on shells.

The linear and quadratic beams include the effects of shear deformation. The cubic beams in ABAQUS/Standard do not account for shear flexibility. The open-section beam elements in ABAQUS/Standard correctly model the effects of torsion and warping (including warping constraints) in thin-walled, open sections.

Multi-point constraints, constraint equations, and connectors can be used to connect degrees of freedom at nodes to model pinned connections, rigid links, etc.

“Bending moment”-type plots allow the results of one-dimensional elements, such as beams, to be visualized easily.

Hard copies of ABAQUS/CAE plots can be obtained in PostScript (PS), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), Tag Image File Format (TIFF), Portable Network Graphics (PNG), and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) formats.