MECHANICS OF ADVANCED MATERIALS AND STRUCTURES, cilt.1, sa.1, ss.1-24, 2024 (SCI-Expanded)
This study develops a novel analytical method to evaluate if box sections, with unequal wall thicknesses under bending, will undergo local buckling prior to reaching their yield strength since the analytical determination of critical local buckling stresses for such sections remains unexplored due to the lack of local buckling coefficients, warranting further investigation in scholarly discourse. Despite not directly computing the local buckling stresses, the developed method specifies a possible critical local buckling stress range by incorporating reference, critical, and equivalent section models, all formulated and developed with uniform wall thicknesses. The formulated method proficiently discerns the occurrence of local buckling by conducting a comparative assessment of the yield strength of the box section material against both the lower (min) and upper (max) bound stresses of the critical local buckling stress range. If local buckling persists unclear after the initial benchmark, the method reaches the final conclusion by comparing the constant wall thickness of the critical section with the web thickness of the box section. The developed method validated against finite element results obtained from linear elastic eigenvalue buckling analyses can be applied to the problem of determining whether such box sections subjected to bending will experience local buckling.