Recommendations for verifying lateral stability of precast beams in transitory phases

This paper presents recommendations for security check of precast beams in transitory phases, compare results of parametric analyzes with national and international code recommendations and confront the formulations used for the calculation of critical load of lateral instability. In transport and lifting phases, precast beams are susceptible to loss lateral stability because the established supports provides little restriction to the element rotate on its principal axis and move laterally. To recommend limits of slenderness, parametric analysis are performed using formulations based on bifurcacional instability, including eigenvalue problems with the finite element method. The results show that the safety limits for I beams and rectangular beams are different. For the analyzed cases and with reference to beam slenderness equation used by fib Model Code [13], the limit determined for rectangular beams would be 85 and for I beams 53, which could be taken as 50, as recommended by the code. Within the analyzed cases of I beams, only the fib Model Code [13] recommendation attend the slenderness limit for transitory phases.