Elastic Critical Load of Tapered Columns

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The elastic critical load of a slender compression member plays an important role when the proper design of that member is required. For the tapered compression members, however, there are cases when the conventional neutral equililbrium or energy method can't be applied to the determination of critical loads of those members. In this paper, finite element method is applied to the approximate determination of the symmetrically tapered bars. Here in this paper, the bars are assumed to take sinusoidally changing shapes along their axes. The parameters considered in this study are taper parameter, $\alpha$ and the sectional property parameter, m. The computed results by finite element method are represented in the forms of algebraic equations. Regression technique is employed to determine the coefficients of algebraic equations. The critical loads estimated by the proposed algebraic equations coincide fairly well with those of finite element method.