Inelastic distortional buckling of hot-rolled I-section beam-columns

The inelastic lateral-distortional buckling of doubly-symmetric hot-rolled I-section beamcolumns subjected to a concentric axial force and uniform bending with elastic restraint which produce single curvature is investigated in this paper. The numerical model adopted in this paper is an energy-based method which leads to the incremental and iterative solution of a fourth-order eigenproblem, with very rapid solutions being obtained. The elastic restraint considered in this paper is full restraint against translation, but torsional restraint is permitted at the tension flange. Hitherto, a numerical method to analyse the elastic and inelastic lateral-distortional buckling of restrained or unrestrained beam-columns is unavailable. The prediction of the inelastic lateral-distortional buckling load obtained in this study is compared with the inelastic lateraldistortional buckling of restrained beams and the inelastic lateral-torsional buckling solution, by suppressing the out-of-plane web distortion, is published elsewhere and they agree reasonable well. The method is then extended to the lateral-distortional buckling of continuously restrained doubly symmetric I-sections to illustrate the effect of web distortion.