Effective moment of inertia for rectangular elastoplastic beams

An effective moment of inertia is developed for a rectangular, prismatic el astoplastic beam with elastic, linear-hardening material behavior. The part icular solution for a beam with elastic, perfectly plastic material behavio r is also presented with applications for beam bending in closed-form. Equa tions are presented for the direct application of the virtual work method f or elastoplastic beams with concentrated and distributed loads. Comparisons are made between the virtual work method deflections and the deflections o btained by using an average effective moment of inertia over two lengths of the beam in the elastoplastic region.