Thin- Walled Curved Beam Theory Based on Centroid-Shear Center Formulation

To overcome the drawback of currently available curved beam theories having non-symmetric thin-walled cross sections, a curved beam theory based on centroid-shear center formulation is presented for the spatially coupled free vibration and elastic analysis. For this, the displacement field is expressed by introducing displacement parameters defined at the centroid and shear center axes, respectively. Next the elastic strain and kinetic energies considering the thickness-curvature effect and the rotary inertia of curved beam are rigorously derived by degenerating the energies of the elastic continuum to those of curved beam. And then the equilibrium equations and the boundary conditions are consistently derived for curved beams having non-symmetric thin-walled cross section. It is emphasized that for curved beams with L- or T-shaped sections, this thin-walled curved beam theory can be easily reduced to the solid beam theory by simply putting the sectional properties associated with warping to zero. In order to illustrate the validity and the accuracy of this study, FE solutions using the Hermitian curved beam elements are presented and compared with the results by previous research and ABAQUS's shell elements.