Elastic buckling of uniformly compressed thin-walled regular polygonal tubes

•Regular polygonal tubes may be susceptible to local and distortional buckling.•Duplicate buckling modes are obtained in some cases.•Shear deformation may influence significantly distortional buckling stresses.•Both analytical and numerical results are presented.

This paper investigates the elastic buckling (bifurcation) behaviour of uniformly compressed thin-walled tubular members with single-cell regular polygonal cross-sections (RCPS), such as those employed to build transmission line structures, towers, antennas and masts. A specialisation of Generalised Beam Theory (GBT) for RCPS, reported in a recent paper (Gonçalves and Camotim, 2013) [1], is used to obtain both analytical and numerical results concerning the most relevant buckling modes and provide novel and broad conclusions on the structural behaviour of this type of members. In particular, local, cross-section extensional, distortional and multi-mode (including global flexural) buckling phenomena are addressed. For validation purposes, the GBT-based results are compared with solutions taken from the literature and also with numerical values obtained from finite strip analyses.