Optimisation of No Sway Plane Rigid Frames against Buckling

摘要

The paper proposes a simple method which optimises the design of plane, rigid no sway frame structures based on the system buckling load. It is centred on either maximising the buckling load or minimising the weight of the structure, or both; and to have all stories buckling at the same time. The approach to calculate the system buckling load is derived and also presented. The optimisation method is applied to various frames examples and the results are compared to that obtained from a system buckling analysis performed with ANSYS finite element analysis (FEA) software. The proposed optimisation procedure proved successful for no sway multi-story rigid frames, as validated by the acceptable percentage differences of below 5% from the FEA analysis.