SAFETY FACTORS OF BEAMS SUBJECTED TO PURE BENDING

A procedure is developed to determine the safety factors of straight b eams with rectangular cross-sections. To represent material behavior, a variety of stress-strain curves were used. The material of the beams was chosen to possess smooth changing stress-strain relations. The re sults were compared with those results of beams for which stress-strai n relations had been idealized as linear elastic-perfectly plastic. Th e procedure in determining yield and fully plastic moments utilized a computational technique. Loads were increased incrementally up to rupt ure and the modified Newton-Raphson method was used to find the stress es. Experiments were performed to prove the validity of the analytic r esults. The reliability of a system using such structural elements can be predicted with the safety factors developed in this work. Copyrigh t (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.