Inelastic buckling behavior of steel members under reversed cyclic loading

The objective of this study is to simulate and investigate the inelastic buckling behavior of steel members under reversed cyclic loading. Cyclic inelastic buckling behavior is briefly discussed. Considering a large inelastic deformation, we propose a finite element discretization scheme for beam analysis that is simple and general. To verify the numerical model, the cyclic inelastic buckling behavior of beams is analyzed, and the solutions are compared with the experimental results. The proposed finite element procedure shows good predictive capability for simulating the inelastic buckling behavior of beam members under reversed cyclic loading. We perform various numerical experiments to investigate the reduction behavior of critical loads under cyclic load reversals depending on the slenderness ratio and initial imperfection. It is observed that the reduction is largest for intermediate beams with a slenderness ratio around 80.