EN 1993 Practice Paper: Buckling Analysis of Steel Bridges

Eurocode 3 presents definitions of slenderness in terms of critical forces or critical stresses to facilitate determination of slenderness from a computer elastic critical buckling analysis. This analysis will not always be required (there are often simpler provisions), but its availability allows more accurate slenderness determination than might otherwise be obtained by simple codified equations. Determination of slenderness can be avoided by carrying out second order analysis allowing for imperfections; this is a more time-consuming approach but will often given a more economic result, although not always depending on the imperfections used. The exceptions are discussed in the paper.