Elastic lateral-distortional buckling of I-beams and the Meck Plot

Meck Plot is an adapted version of the well-known Southwell method to the case of lateral-torsional buckling, which indeed reflects the physical inter-dependence of lateral flexure (lateral displacement) and torsion (rotation) in the structure. In the recent reported studies, it has been shown experimentally and theoretically that lateral displacement of an I-beam undergoing elastic lateral-distortional mode of buckling is interestingly directly coupled with other various deformation characteristics such as web transverse strain, web longitudinal strain, vertical deflection, and angles of twist of top and bottom flanges, and consequently good results have been obtained as a result of application of the Meck's method on lateral displacement together with each of the aforementioned deformation variables. In this paper, it is demonstrated that even web transverse and longitudinal strains, vertical deflection, and angles of twist of top and bottom flanges of an I-beam undergoing elastic lateral-distortional buckling are two-by-two directly coupled and the application of the Meck Plot on each pair of these deformation variables may still yield reliable predictions for the critical buckling load.