Lateral Buckling

A stability case closely related to flexural-torsional buckling is the so-called lateral buckling of beams under longitudinal and transverse loads, which occurs mainly in slender beams with strongly varying moments of inertia. In this chapter, we first discuss an elementary lateral buckling problem of a beam under moment load for motivation before we turn to a generalized formulation within the framework of second-order theory. The resulting differential equations are then solved in an exact analytical manner for elementary cases. The Ritz method is again considered as a suitable approximation method. This chapter concludes with a consideration of the lateral buckling of beams with a fixed axis of rotation and beams with torsionally elastic foundation.