Research on elastic buckling of columns, beam and plates: Focussing on formulas and design charts

Abstract

Although there are many numerical methods which may be used to evaluate critical elastic design parameters accurately, designers still prefer to sacrifice accuracy for simplicity. Approximate formulas or design charts from handbooks and standard texts are used, or conservative assumptions are made to simplify the problem so as to justify their use. Until powerful, user-friendly and inexpensive software becomes readily available to designers, approximate formulas and design charts continue to be used. In recent years, collaborative work between the authors and their research associates has yielded a number of approximate buckling formulas and design charts for critical loads for columns, beams and plates. A review of these research investigations is presented herein, together with some of the newly developed buckling formulas and design charts.