programming the finite element...

(ebook) - programming the finite element method with matlabPrograming the Finite Element Method with Matlab
Jack Chessa 3rd October 2002

1

Introduction

The goal of this document is to give a very brief overview and direction in the writing of nite element code using Matlab. It is assumed that the reader has a basic familiarity with the theory of the nite element method, and our attention will be mostly on the implementation. An example nite element code for analyzing static linear elastic problems written in Matlab is presented to illustrate how to program the nite element method. The example program and supporting les are available at http://www.tam.northwestern.edu/jfc795/Matlab/

1.1

Notation

For clarity we adopt the following notation in this paper; the bold italics font v denotes a vector quantity of dimension equal to the spacial dimens