Prebuckling Deflections and Lateral Buckling. II: Applications

In a companion paper, it was pointed out that when the ratio of the out‐of‐plane flexural stiffness to the in‐plane flexural stiffness is not small, classical analysis may lead to inaccurate predictions of the out‐of‐plane lateral buckling loads of beams and beam‐columns, since the effects of the in‐plane prebuckling deformations are not considered. This paper investigates numerically the effects of the in‐plane prebuckling deformations on the lateral buckling of beams and beam‐columns by using the finite element procedure developed in the companion paper. The numerical results show that the classical predictions of the lateral buckling loads of beams and beam‐columns are generally conservative, but the predictions obtained by a linearized procedure that ignores second‐order terms are overestimated. The predictions by the nonlinear iteration procedure recommended in the companion paper agree well with the experimental results. The effects of span length and height of the load point have also been investigated. It is shown that lateral buckling is possible for sections where the out‐of‐plane flexural stiffness is equal to or greater than the in‐plane flexural stiffness.