Spatial Stability of Nonsymmetric Thin-Walled Curved Beams. II: Numerical Approach

In a companion paper, for spatial stability of nonsymmetric thin-walled curved beams, a general formulation was derived based on a displacement field considering the secondorder terms of semitangential rotations. Closed-form solutions were newly derived for in-plane and out-of-plane buckling of simply supported curved beams with monosymmetric sections subjected to pure bending or uniform compression. In this paper, to get numerical solutions for the buckling of thin-walled curved beams subjected to general loadings, finite-element procedures are developed using thin-walled curved beam elements and straight frame elements with nonsymmetric sections. Numerical examples for the spatial buckling of doubly symmetric, monosymmetric, and nonsymmetric thin-walled circular beams are presented and compared with previously published solutions to illustrate the accuracy and the practical usefulness of the analytical solutions and numerical procedures.