5. Summary of results

The results obtained are in very good agreement with the reference, regardless of the beam element used. It may be noted that the multi-fiber element obtains better tolerances than the beam element in large rotations, however the latter requires in practice to perform much fewer loading steps.

Moreover, despite an arched structure, discretized in only 8 elements and undergoing large rotations, the continuity of the degrees of freedom at the nodes of the elements is well ensured for both models.