ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the elastic buckling of simply supported beams. The beams are assumed to be perfectly straight and untwisted before loading and to be loaded by moments or loads which initially cause deflections only in the plane of loading. It is assumed that the directions of the loads or of the planes of the applied moments remain unchanged during buckling. For doubly symmetric beams, the tensile and compressive bending stresses are equal, and so the increased buckling resistance caused by the tensile stresses is balanced by the increased buckling action caused by the compressive stresses. The buckling resistance of a simply supported beam may be significantly affected by the distances of transverse loads from the shear centre axis. The effects of load height on the buckling resistances of simply supported beams with uniformly distributed loads are similar to the concentrated loads.
