Elastic Critical Moment of Lateral-Distortional Buckling of Steel-Concrete Composite Beams under Uniform Hogging Moment

Great attention has been given in the last few years to steel–concrete composite beams due to the gains in strength that can be obtained with the small cost of installing a shear connection between the steel profile and the concrete slab. In continuous and semicontinuous composite beams close to the internal supports, hogging bending moments are developed and the compressed bottom flange may buckle laterally in an unstable way known as the lateral-distortional buckling, characterized by a horizontal displacement and twist of the bottom flange with an out-of-plane distortion of the web. In the literature, several formulations were proposed to determine the critical moment for this type of buckling. Among them, some of the most relevant are presented by [K. Roik, G. Hanswille and J. Kina, Solution for the lateral torsional buckling problem of composite beams (in German), Stahlbau 59 (1990)] and [G. Hanswille, J. Lindner and D. Munich, Lateral torsional buckling of composite beams (in German), Stahlbau 67 (1998)]. In the present work, a new procedure is developed to determine the elastic critical moment of lateral–distortional buckling of composite beams under uniform hogging moment. To assess and calibrate this procedure, 7[Formula: see text]772 numerical models were analyzed by the finite element code ANSYS and the results were compared with the ones obtained from the new proposed formulas. The procedure presented excellent agreement with the numerical results, with an average deviation of 2.33% from the computational simulations. The formulations of [K. Roik, G. Hanswille and J. Kina, Solution for the lateral torsional buckling problem of composite beams (in German), Stahlbau 59 (1990)] and [G. Hanswille, J. Lindner and D. Munich, Lateral torsional buckling of composite beams (in German), Stahlbau 67 (1998)] did not lead to such satisfactory results, presenting an average deviation of 12.41% and 16.51%, respectively.