Analytical method for the out-of-plane buckling of the jib system with middle strut

The jib system with middle strut is widely used to achieve the large arm length in the large scale tower crane and the deployability in the mobile construction crane. In this paper, an analytical solution for the out-of-plane buckling of the jib system with middle strut is proposed. To obtain the analytical expression of the buckling characteristic equation, the method of differential equation was adopted by establishing the bending and torsional differential equation of the jib system under the instability critical state. Compared with the numerical solutions of the finite element software ANSYS, the analytical results in this work agree well with them. Therefore, the correctness of the results in this work can be confirmed. Then the influences of the lateral stiffness of the cable fixed joint, the dip angle of the strut, the inertia moment of the strut, and the horizontal position of the cable fixed joint on the out-of-plane buckling behavior of the jib system were investigated.