Restrained distortional buckling (RDB) is different from overall buckling and distortional buckling, and it usually occurs in the hogging moment region of composite beams. It may govern the member design for some cases, and should be taken into consideration. The present paper investigates the elastic RDB of composite beams based on elastically supported column method. First, Svensson's elastically supported column model is improved by including the participation of the web as part of the buckling column. The corresponding theoretical expressions for the improved elastically support column subjected to a varying axial force are derived by the potential energy expression and equilibrium differential equation, respectively. Then, the precision of several elastically supported column methods for the RDB problem is discussed, based on the finite element method (FEM). The results show that elastically supported columns subjected to a negative uniform moment or a triangular moment have a good agreement with FEM results, but they are not valid for the cases of nonlinear moment distributions. In order to consider the complicated load conditions of composite beams, the equivalent moment assumption is introduced and proved to be suitable for the RDB problem. However, there is an applicable range of the length of the hogging moment region. Thus, a critical length formula of equivalent moment assumption of RDB is put forward and verified by FEM. Furthermore, a three-step simplified method is presented which can solve the elastic RDB problem of continuous composite beams. The proposed method, in which values of elastically supported column methods can be tabulated previously, is simple and suitable for design purposes.
Lateral distortional buckling of cellular composite-beams
