Buckling Capacities of Monosymmetric I‐Beams

The paper examines the elastic lateral buckling of simply supported monosymmetric I‐beams under transverse loads. Solutions are obtained in terms of the easily evaluated degree of beam monosymmetry parameter, ρ, and the beam parameter, $\overline{K}\text{.}$ It was found that the moment modification factors of double symmetric I‐beams presently used in design formulas to predict the buckling capacities of monosymmetric I‐beams could be unsafe. Consequently, alternative simple approximate formulas are derived from the energy method, based on the study of the buckled mode shapes of monosymmetric I‐beams. The proposed formulas retain the familiar form of the well‐known solution of beams under uniform moment. Moreover, the paper gives guidelines for achieving the optimum degrees of beam monosymmetry.