Influence of in-Plane Deformation in Higher Order Beam Theories

Comparing Euler-Bernoulli or Tismoshenko beam theory to higher order beam theories, an essential difference can be depicted: the additional degrees of freedom accounting for out-of plane (warping) and in-plane (distortional) phenomena leading to the appearance of respective higher order geometric constants. In this paper, after briefly overviewing literature of the major beam theories taking account warping and distortional deformation, the influence of distortion in the response of beams evaluated by higher order beam theories is examined via a numerical example of buckling drawn from the literature.