ABSTRACT
This chapter presents solutions for plane stress problems in two-dimensional elasticity, with plane strain problems similarly tackled by a suitable conversion of elastic constants. The scope of direct application for the plane stress strips in structural analysis is somewhat limited but may include deep beams, layered or sandwich beams. A higher order strip having one additional internal nodal line was later presented by Loo and Cusens. In this strip a parabolic variation of displacements across the section is assumed and it is found, as expected, that stress jumps at the interface of adjoining strips are much smaller than those found in the lower order strip analysis. The higher order strips have been formulated for the simply supported case only. Although no difficulty should be encountered in the extension to cover other boundary conditions, the materials presented in the subsequent sections on higher order strips will nevertheless be limited to that of a simply supported strip only.
