Eccentric compressive load on short pultruded wide flange beam

In this paper, the simple closed form solutions for the normal stress and displacements of short thin-walled pultruded wide flange beam subjected to eccentric partially distributed axial load are presented. Due to eccentric compressive load, the beam is subjected to compression, bending in two principal planes and torsion simultaneously. Theory of bending and theory of torsion of open cross sections with influence of shear are utilized in the static analysis of the beam-column to obtain analytical expressions for the normal stress. Also, translational and rotational displacements are defined using classical Vlasov solution and deflections and angle of torsion are augmented with additional components due to shear in bending and torsion. The analytical solutions according to Vlasov and those obtained with theory of bending and torsion with influence of shear are compared to the finite element method solutions obtained by using shell finite elements. The relative errors, calculated with classical Vlasov approach with respect to the finite element solutions, in amount of 30-75% for normal stress and 17-40% for the maximum displacement are reduced to less than 5% using the proposed method. It is proved that the shear effect must be taken into analysis of short thin-walled beams for this type of the problems.