Abstract: ow to reduce the time in structural analysis and design has been alwaysa remarkable problem for engineers and researchers. Because of the nonlinear and parallel processing ability, Neural Networks (NN) has been widely used. In this paper, some fundamental problems about the applications of NN in structural analysis have been studied through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation. Based on the Hopfield NN, the concept of Energy Functional and the Minimal Potential Principle, the computation of elastic...