Shear buckling of thin-walled channel sections

The elastic buckling stresses of channel sections with and without lips and subject to shear forces parallel with the web are determined, where computational modelling of the thin-walled steel sections is implemented by means of a spline finite strip analysis. Both unlipped and lipped channels are studied, where the main variables are flange width, different boundary conditions and shear flow distribution. The channel sections are also analysed at different lengths, to investigate the effect of length/width ratio on the critical shear buckling stresses. Comparisons between cases and with classical solutions are included in this paper.