Creep Buckling of a Nonlinearly Viscoelastic Beam-Column

摘要

The stability of an initially crooked, simply-supported, H-section beam-column, subjected to an axial compressive load, is investigated. The material of the column is taken to behave as a general nonlinear viscoelastic solid. It is assumed that the constitutive relation of the material can be represented by a Volterra-Frechet functional polynominal. Conditions sufficient to assure instantaneous, short term and long term (i.e., asymptotic) stability are established. It is shown that complete knowledge of the material creep functions (i.e., the kernals appearing in the functional polynomial representation of the stress-strain relation) is not required in order to determine stability conditions. A program of experiments to characterize the material for stability studies is presented. (Author)