Elastic flexural-torsional buckling of thin-walled cantilevers

Previous studies by the authors revealed that the two representative theories with slight differences between, widely used in investigating the flexural-torsional buckling of thin-walled beams, have led to two different solutions in well-known literature for assessing critical loads of simply supported beams of monosymmetric cross section. With these two solutions, significant differences in critical loads may be found for these monosymmetric beams. Based on the classical variational principle for buckling analyses, a new theory on the flexural-torsional buckling of thin-walled members was proposed by the authors. In this paper, this new theory as well as the other two typical theories is employed to investigate the flexural-torsional buckling of cantilevers.This paper first gives a brief review and a careful comparative study on the flexural-torsional buckling of thin-walled cantilevers employing three different buckling theories. Differences between these theories are demonstrated with investigations on buckling of cantilevers under pure bending and two typical transverse loads. Explicit solutions, capable of considering variations of beam length and loading position along the vertical axis of cross section, are presented for predicting the critical loads of doubly symmetric cantilevers under two typical transverse loads. Advantages of presented solutions, such as good accuracy and ease of use, are exploited through the comparisons of critical results with those from existing solutions and finite element analyses.