BUCKLING OF BEAMS WITH A BOUNDARY ELEMENT TECHNIQUE.

The present work is devoted to the buckling study of non-homogeneous fixedfixed beams with intermediate spring support. The stability issue of these beams leads to three-point boundary value problems. If the Green functions of these boundary value problems are known, the differential equations of the stability problems that contain the critical load sought can be turned into eigenvalue problems given by homogeneous Fredholm integral equations. The kernel function of these equations can be calculated from the associated Green functions. The eigenvalue issues can be reduced to algebraic eigenvalue problems, which are subsequently solvable numerically with the use of an efficient algorithm from the boundary element method. Within this article, the critical load findings of these beams are compared to those obtained using commercial finite element software, and the results are in excellent correlation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]