Lateral-distortional buckling of beams with hollow flanges and folded plate webs

Finite strip analyses of simply supported hollow flange beams in uniform bending show that there is a significant interaction between distortion and uniform torsion during lateral buckling, which may be approximated by combining their flexibilities. More accurate finite element analyses show that the finite strip predictions are conservative. An approximate method of predicting the effects of flange distortion on elastic lateral buckling is presented which shows good agreement with the finite element predictions.