Beam-element-based analysis of locally and/or distortionally buckled members: Application

The companion paper [1] presents a theory to account for the effects of local and/or distortional buckling in a seven degrees of freedom beam finite element analysis. The theory considers the effect of local and/or distortional buckling as a reduction in tangent rigidities, and determines the reduced tangent rigidities by an a priori post-local or post-distortional buckling analysis of a short length of section. In this paper, the presented method is incorporated into the open source software package OpenSees which was previously modified to account for warping effects [2]. The accuracy of the method is validated by comparison with shell element results for beams, columns and frames.