1

Sec. 1.3] The finite element enigma

Introduction

1.1 BASIC TERMINOLOGY

Simple engineering notations are adopted in this book, and tensorial expressions have
been avoided. Many parameters presented in this book may be referred to as vectors,
or matrices. A vector is a column matrix, which may be written horizontally between
braces, for example:
 a1 
a 
a =  a1 a2 ... an    2 
 ... 
 
an 

which represents a vector or a column matrix of order n x 1. To avoid any confusion,

row matrices are expressed in square brackets, or in terms of a transposed vector; that
is,
 a1 a2 ... an   a t

is a row matrix of order 1 x n.

A scalar quantity defined as follows:
 2
Sec. 1.4] Basic terminology

n
s =  a i bi
i =1

may be written in the following equivalent matrix form:

s = at b  bt a

where b =  b1 b2 ... bn 

A matrix A of order m  n has m rows and n columns, and may be expressed explicitly
as follows:
 A11 A12 ... A1 n 
 
 A21 A22 ... A2 n 
A= 
 ... ... ... ... 
 
 Am1 Am 2 ... Am n 

and if m = n the matrix is known as a square matrix, which has a determinant

expressed as | A | . A square matrix is singular if the value of its determinant is zero.
A diagonal matrix of order n may be written in the following equivalent forms:
where
 D11 0 ... 0 
 0 D ... 0 
D=  22
  D11 D22 ... Dn n 
 ... ... ... ... 
 
 0 0 ... Dn n 

If D11 = D22 =    = Dn n = 1 , then the matrix D is a unit matrix of order n, and is

usually written as In. Null matrices or vectors, i.e. those with zero elements will be
denoted by: O.
Some parameters such as stresses and strains have different ways of representation.
The bold letters: σ, ε denote the engineering representation of stress and strain
vectors, or column matrices, whilst  ,   will be employed to represent stress and
strain 3 x 3 matrices.