Collapse Load for Thin-Walled Rectangular Tubes

In this chapter, thin-walled rectangular tubes under pure bending are considered, by per- forming a series of FEM numerical studies. In the simulation, a homogeneous and isotropic elastic perfectly plastic material was employed for the tube material. A commonly used method for predicting the collapse load of rectangular tubes subjected to pure bending was proposed by Kecman. Kecman’s method focuses on a slenderness of the flange. When buckling occurs in the flange, this method uses a collapse load corresponding to the post buckling strength of the flange. When buckling does not occur at the flange, this method used a relation of the flange slenderness to the cross-sectional fully plastic yielding. This method for predicting the collapse loads is effective when the aspect ratio of web to flange is not large. However, for large aspect ratios, there is a large discrepancy between the values of maximum moment corresponding to the collapse loads obtained from this method and the FEM numerical results due to an effect of web slenderness. A new method is proposed to predict the maximum moment considering the effect of web slenderness. The validity of the collapse load estimation is checked by the results of FEM numerical simulation. method, algorithm based on the Newton–Raphson method, and return-mapping method were used. The tubes were meshed using four-node (Element with five points across the A was