A corotational beam element to model the hysteretic bending behavior of metallic wire ropes

In this paper we propose a mechanical model for metallic wire ropes, starting from a description of their internal structure as an assembly of helical curved thin rods and accounting for some characteristic aspects of their response, such as.: (a) the coupling between axial force and torque, (b) the non-linear and non-holonomic relation between bending moment and curvature. A numerical procedure to define a cross-sectional constitutive law in terms of generalized stress and strains of the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory is presented together with its implementation within a 3D corotational beam element.