Local buckling behavior of stiffened curved elements

Abstract A series of stub column and beam tests has been performed to determine the initial buckling stress of stiffened curved elements. A semi-empirical expression has been developed for the elastic, local buckling of stiffened curved elements subject to uniform axial compression. For inelastic buckling, the tangent modulus approach is employed. Also, methods have been developed to predict the interaction between the local buckling of flat and curved elements and to predict local buckling of curved elements subject to bending. The predicted buckling loads, based on these expressions, are compared to the test data.