Global Stiffness Matrix

[Freyster98]

I am having trouble forming the Global Stiffness Matrix for a planar truss. Does anyone know of any good online resources to help me with this? I've found a few, but haven't been much help.

[Brian_C]

I don't know of any online sources, but the FEA class I'm taking uses a book called "A First Course in the Finite Element Method" by Logan. It contains an excellent description of the plane truss problem with worked examples.

[Sting1983]

I agree with Brian C...Logan's book is a superb introduction to FEA and has the plane truss problem.

If you want to use ANSYS to solve the problem, I believe Moaveni's book on the FEA has one or two examples. I used Moaveni's book for my FEA class and while it's not great to learn from, it's pretty decent as a walkthru for ANSYS.