Lateral-torsional buckling assessment of I-beams with sinusoidally corrugated web

Abstract

This paper assesses the elastic and inelastic lateral-torsional buckling resistance of I-beams with sinusoidal corrugated web through an extended 22 degrees of freedom thin-walled beam-column finite element method. The appropriate hand calculation methods to determine the elastic critical moment of corrugated web beams are based on the modification of the warping constant of the cross-section. Instead of modifying the warping constant, the corrugated web is modelled as a thin, equivalent orthotropic plate with uniform thickness. An approximate expression is also derived from the total potential strain energy of the beam using the Ritz method. The result of the parametric study showed that the developed finite element is accurate and applicable for linear buckling analysis of beams with sinusoidal web corrugation. With the results of the linear buckling analysis the plastic resistance of the corrugated web beam can also be determined. Based on advanced finite element simulations' results the parametric study showed that the standard-based imperfection factor leads to conservative results to predict the inelastic lateral-torsional buckling resistance of sinusoidally corrugated beams, so a more precise but still safe imperfection factor is proposed for sinusoidally corrugated web beams.