Lateral torsional buckling of thin-walled beams subject to bending about the minor axis

It is commonly assumed that lateral torsional buckling about the minor axis does not occur, and this assumption is adopted by BS S950. This paper demonstrates that this is not in general true for thin-walled channel sections. It has been shown5 that Young's equation for the buckling of imperfect columns could be applied separately to the rotation and translation of torsionally buckling struts to describe correctly the stress distribution in the strut and hence to find the axial force that causes yield; failure follows shortly thereafter. In this paper the same method is applied to find the lateral torsional buckling resistance of members subject to uniform bending.