Interactive buckling and load carrying capacity of thin-walled beam–columns with intermediate stiffeners

The design of thin-walled beam–columns must take into account the overall instability and the instability of component plates in the form of local buckling. This investigation is concerned with interactive buckling of thin-walled beam–columns with central intermediate stiffeners under axial compression and a constant bending moment. The columns are assumed to be simply supported at their ends. The asymptotic expansion established by Byskov and Hutchinson (AIAA J. 15 (1977) 941) is employed in the numerical calculations performed by means of the transition matrix method and Godunov’s orthogonalisation. Instead of the finite strip method, the exact transition matrix method is used in this case. The most important advantage of this method is that it enables us to describe a complete range of behaviour of thin-walled structures from all global (flexural, flexural-torsional, lateral, distortional and their combinations) to local stability. In the presented method for lower bound estimation of the load carrying capacity of structures, it is postulated that the reduced local critical load should be determined taking into account the global pre-critical bending within the first order non-linear approximation to the theory of the interactive buckling of the structure. The paper’s aim is to expand the study of the equilibrium path in the post-buckling behaviour of imperfect structures with regard to the second order non-linear approximation. In the solution obtained, the transformation of buckling modes with an increase of the load up to the ultimate load, the effect of cross-sectional distortions and the shear lag phenomenon are included. The calculations are carried out for a few beam–columns. The results are compared to those obtained from the design code and to the data reported by other authors. The results discussed in the present study represent the most important results obtained by the authors in earlier investigations devoted to central intermediate stiffeners (Int. J. Solid Struct. 32 (1995) 1501; Eng. Trans. 43 (1995) 383; Int. J. Solid Struct. 37 (2000) 3323; Int. J. Solid Struct. 33 (1996) 315; Thin Wall. Struct. 39 (2001) 649; Arch. Mech. Eng. XLVIII (2001) 29).