Shear‐Flexural Buckling of Columns

Abstract

Elastic flexural buckling formulas for columns under an end‐concentrated load and axial uniformly distributed load (or selfweight) found in the literature or newly derived by the writers, are summarized herein. However, these formulas overestimate the critical buckling loads when the columns are short or consist of struts connected by lacing bars or batten plates, since the effect of shearing force on their deflections becomes significant. This paper investigates the stability of such columns, with a high shear flexibility factor, under a general combined end‐concentrated load and axial distributed load. Stability criterion design curves, obtained from the finite element approach, are presented for a wide range of column end conditions. The influence of the shear flexibility factor on the critical loads is also examined. Moreover, some simple shear‐flexural buckling formulas for columns under combined end‐concentrated load and axial trapezoidal load are proposed.