Out-of-Plane Buckling Analysis of Curved Beams Considering Rotatory Inertia Using DQM

Curved beams are increasingly used in buildings, vehicles, ships, and aircraft, which has resulted in considerable effort towards developing an accurate method for analyzing the dynamic behavior of such structures. The stability behavior of elastic curved beams has been the subject of many investigations. Solutions to the relevant differential equations have traditionally been obtained by the standard finite difference or finite element methods. However, these techniques require a great deal of computer time for a large number of discrete nodes with conditions of complex geometry and loading. One efficient procedure for the solution of partial differential equations is the differential quadrature method (DQM). This method has been applied to many cases to overcome the difficulties of complex algorithms and high storage requirements for complex geometry and loading conditions. Out-of-plane buckling of curved beams with rotatory inertia were analyzed using DQM under uniformly distributed radial loads. Critical loads were calculated for the member with various parameter ratios, boundary conditions, and opening angles. The results were compared with exact results from other methods for available cases. The DQM used only a limited number of grid points and shows very good agreement with the exact results (less than 0.3% error). New results according to diverse variation are also suggested, which show important roles in the buckling behavior of curved beams and can be used for comparisons with other numerical solutions or experimental test data.