In-plane bending of Timoshenko beams in bilateral frictionless contact with an elastic half-space using a coupled FE-BIE method

Making use of a mixed variational formulation including the Green function of the substrate, a finite element model is derived for the static analysis of Timoshenko beams in bilateral frictionless contact with an elastic half-space. Numerical results are obtained by adopting locking-free Hermite polynomials for the Timoshenko beam and piecewise constant reaction over the soil. Foundation beams loaded by forces and couples at the midspan illustrate accuracy and convergence properties of the proposed formulation.