TABLE OF CONTENTS In the Following three chapters the analysis technique known as the "Curvature Method" is presented. As the name implies, the curvature curve instead of deflection curve plays the key role in the analysis. In the previous discussions of the deflection method, we have seen that a direct analytical solution for the deflection of a plastic beam-column cannot be obtained because of the nonlinear nature of the basic differential equations which are often intractable and recourse must be had to numerical procedures such as CDC's to obtain solutions.
The most important feature of such problems is, however, to develop the relation between the slenderness ratio and the critical load. To obtain the deflection curve is merely an intermediate step. It will be seen herein and in later chapters that the curvature curve can serve the same purpose for the plastic analytical solution as deflection does for an elastic analysis. The steps to obtain solutions are then reduced considerably.
In this chapter, the method of obtaining closed-form solutions for the distribution of the curvatures along the beam-columns for symmetrically loaded cases is presented. The method uses the analytical moment-curvature-thrust relationships derived previously in Chap. 5 for a general column section. This method is then extended in Chap. 10 to deal with more general loading cases by using the concept of the Column Curvature Curves ( CCC's). Studies of masonry walls, concrete-filled steel tubular columns and reinforced concrete columns made using this analysis are presented in...
