Flexible beam structures are popular in civil and mechanical engineering. Many of these structures undergo large displacements and finite rotations, but with small deformations. Their dynamic behaviors are usually investigated using finite beam elements. A well known method to derive such beam elements is the corotational approach. This method has been extensively used in nonlinear static analysis. However, its application in nonlinear dynamics is rather limited. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the nonlinear dynamic behavior of flexible beam structures using the corotational method.

For the 2D case, a new dynamic corotational beam formulation is presented. The idea is to adopt the same corotational kinetic description in static and dynamic parts. The main novelty is to use cubic interpolations to derive both inertia terms and internal terms in order to capture correctly all inertia effects. This new formulation is compared with two classic formulations using constant Timoshenko and constant lumped mass matrices. This work is presented in the first appended journal paper.

For the 3D case, update procedures of finite rotations, which are central issues in development of nonlinear beam elements in dynamic analysis, are discussed. Three classic and one new formulations of beam elements based on the three different parameterizations of the finite rotations are presented. In these formulations, the corotational method is used to develop expressions of the internal forces and the tangent stiffness matrices, while the dynamic terms are formulated into a total Lagrangian context. Many aspects of the four formulations are investigated. First, theoretical derivations as well as practical implementations are given in details. The similarities and differences between the formulations are pointed out. Second, numerical accuracy and computational efficiency of these four formulations are compared. Regarding efficiency, the choice of the predictor at each time step and the possibility to simplify the tangent inertia matrix are carefully investigated. This work is presented in the second appended journal paper.

To make this thesis self-contained, two chapters concerning the parametrization of the finite rotations and the derivation of the 3D corotational beam element in statics are added.