Lateral-torsional buckling of prismatic and tapered thin-walled open beams: assessing the influence of pre-buckling deflections

The paper begins by presenting a unified variational approach to the lateral-torsional buckling (LTB) analysis of doubly symmetric prismatic and tapered thin-walled beams with open cross-sections, which accounts for the influence of the pre-buckling deflections. This approach (i) extends the kinematical assumptions usually adopted for prismatic beams, (ii) consistently uses shell membrane theory in general coordinates and (iii) adopts Trefftz's criterion to perform the bifurcation analysis. The proposed formulation is then applied to investigate the influence of the pre-buckling deflections on the LTB behaviour of prismatic and web-tapered I-section simply supported beams and cantilevers. After establishing an interesting analytical result, valid for prismatic members with shear centre loading, several elastic critical moments/loads are presented, discussed and, when possible, also compared with values reported in the literature. These numerical results, which are obtained by means of the Rayleigh-Ritz method, (i) highlight the qualitative differences existing between the LTB behaviours of simply supported beams and cantilevers and (ii) illustrate how the influence of the pre-buckling deflections on LTB is affected by a number of factors, namely (ii(1)) the minor-to-major inertia ratio, (ii(2)) the beam length, (iii) the location of the load point of application and (ii(4)) the bending moment diagram shape.