Experimental and numerical research on the critical temperature of laterally unrestrained steel I beams

The experimental data was compared with numerical solutions, obtained from a geometric and material nonlinear analysis. A shell finite element modelling, with incremental and iterative procedures, was used in the numerical calculations. Good agreement was obtained between experimental and numerical data. However, both numerical and experimental results lead to higher critical temperatures when compared with the simplified calculation procedure presented in Eurocode for this case.