Distortional instability of fabricated monosymmetric I-beams

Abstract An energy method is presented to determine the elastic critical moments of simply supported monosymmetric I-beams in uniform bending. The method is very efficient computationally, since it results in an eigenproblem for stiffness matrices of order four. The energy method is shown to agree very well with established results. Parameters affecting distortional buckling are considered, and it is shown that coupling of distortion and the Wagner effect can result in substantially reduced lateral buckling loads in some cases.