The purpose of this thesis is to propose several corotational beam formulations for both 2D and 3D nonlinear dynamic analyse of flexible structures. The main novelty of these formulations is that the cubic interpolation functions are used to derive not only the internal force vector and the tangent stiffness matrix but also the inertial force vector and the dynamic matrix. By neglecting the quadratic terms of the local transversal displacements, closed-form expressions for the inertial terms are obtained for 2D problems. Based on an extensive comparative study of the parameterizations of the finite rotations and the time stepping method, and by adopting an approximation of the local rotations, two consistent and effective beam formulations for 3D dynamics are developed. In contrast with the first formulation, the second one takes into account the warping deformations and the shear center eccentricity. The accuracy of these formulations is demonstrated through several numerical examples.
