The meshed beam cross-section capability allows for the description of a beam cross-section that is geometrically complex or composed of more than one material. The meshed cross-section modeling approach is intended for structures that are expected to respond like beams but do not permit the use of a predefined cross-section shape.

To use meshed beam cross-sections in a beam analysis, the beam cross-section is first meshed with two-dimensional warping elements. The meshed cross-section is used to numerically integrate the beam stiffness and inertia properties and to calculate the out-of-plane warping function in ABAQUS/Standard. The two-dimensional ABAQUS/Standard analysis writes the cross-sectional properties to an input-file-ready text file called jobname.bsp. This file is used to define the appropriate section stiffness and inertia data for a subsequent ABAQUS/Standard or ABAQUS/Explicit beam element analysis. The cross-section is pre-integrated and remains elastic throughout the analysis (*BEAM GENERAL SECTION only). The generated beam cross-section properties include the axial, bending, torsional, and transverse shear stiffness; mass, rotary inertia, and damping properties; and the location of the centroid and shear center. In addition, the equivalent beam cross-section properties include information on stress recovery, such as the warping function and its derivatives. Once the beam element analysis is complete, the Visualization module of ABAQUS/CAE can be used to visualize the results at preselected points along the beam length or to examine detailed stress and strain results in the two-dimensional meshed cross-section.

The verification tests that follow are divided into two sections. The first section contains analyses in which the cross-section properties for two-dimensional models of meshed cross-sections are obtained. The cross-section shapes include the standard beam sections that are available for use with beam elements, such as I-sections or rectangular sections, and nonstandard beam sections, such as C-sections and airfoil sections. The second section verifies the results obtained for beam analyses using the SECTION=MESHED parameter by comparing them with the results obtained using the SECTION=GENERAL parameter for a number of different procedure types.