Abstract
Thin-walled beams are widely used with various restraint arrangements and sizes in steel construction. Web distortion is a major concern in the design of highway bridge girders which gains significance with restraint of the top flanges, slender webs, stocky flanges, and/or shorter spans. This paper develops a novel beam-type finite element formulation that is applicable for elastic buckling analysis of thin-walled beams including web distortion. The buckling formulation is developed based on the nonlinear equilibrium equations under the assumption of no pre-buckling deformations. The presentation of the kinematic relations and the interpolation scheme of the distortional beam formulation makes it possible to obtain a rigid-web thin-walled beam finite element formulation as a special case. The developed distortional beam formulation is validated against shell models and known solutions from literature. Effects of web distortion are illustrated in case studies. Convergence tests are conducted to illustrate the efficiency of the developed distortional beam finite element formulation.
Published Version
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