Influence of pre-buckling displacements on the elastic critical loads of thin walled bars of open cross section

Abstract Nonlinear expressions for the strains occurring in thin walled bars of open cross section, when subjected to axial, flexural and torsional displacements, are incorporated in a general instability analysis based on the vanishing of the second variation of the total potential energy. It is shown that the influence of the pre-buckling displacements is automatically included in the analysis. A closed form solution for the lateral buckling of a simply supported beam subjected to uniform bending agrees exactly with a solution based on the governing differential equations. Solutions obtained using numerical methods are also presented. The significance of the second order axial strains induced by rotation about the shear centre, is investigated by considering the instability of an inverted T- beam subjected to uniform bending.