Elastic buckling of steel arches with discrete lateral braces

Lateral brace is an effective way to increase the out-of-plane stability of steel arches, and the certain bracing stiffness achieving full restraining effect is concerned. Unlike braced columns and beams, the buckling of steel arches with discrete lateral braces and the effect of bracing stiffness are not well explored. This paper deals with the bracing stiffness effect of equally-spaced lateral translational braces and rotational braces in steel circular arches pertaining to elastic out-of-plane flexural-torsional buckling. Firstly, for arches with discrete lateral translational braces in uniform compression, an analytical solution for the threshold bracing stiffness is derived by the Rayleigh-Ritz method, ensuring full restraint of the displacement at the bracing points. Then for arches with discrete rotational braces in uniform compression, the flexural-torsional buckling modes are explored using the finite element analysis (FEA), then improved predictions to the buckling load related to the bracing stiffness are obtained theoretically by assuming proper buckling shapes. Compared with the FEA results, it is found that the analytical solutions of threshold stiffness proposed for arches in uniform compression are reasonably accurate and can be used in other loading cases for arches under combined compression and bending moment conservatively.