Solving Highly Complex Elastic Structures in Easy Stages

A systematic procedure is presented to solve quickly very large elastic structures, containing hundreds of component elements. The method is not competitive with existing techniques of solving sets of linear equations and is to be used only when other methods prove inadequate to cope with the capacity of the available computer (slide rule or electronic). Extension of the method—shown here for beams with one dominant dimension only—to structural components having more general and arbitrary shapes should be obvious to those versed in the art of structural analysis.