... elastic and the displacements are small. These assumptions are discussed in more depth later in thebook. In stress analysis, for most analyses of operational loads, linear analysis is adequate as ... If you think of nodal values as data, then shape functions are interpolants of the nodal data. In fact, shape functions can be used as interpolants to fit any data.To show the interpolation property, ... two-point boundary value problems. Table 3.2 gives theparticular meanings of the above variables and parameters for several applications. The natural boundaryconditions can also be generalized as...