Stress analysis of uniform cross-section hollow rectangular cantilever beam with transverse stiffeners under combined load of concentrated and uniformly distributed load

Abstract

Hollow cantilever beams are widely used in the Civil construction, Mining, Marine and Mechanical machine industries to build the bridge and still structure, Mining machineries and support structures, offshore structures, and heavy-duty machines bodies. For any application, the beam structure must work under all undesirable and worst working conditions. Design engineer have great challenge to provide robust design of a cantilever beam to fulfil these requirements. More or less the beam should not be over designed. The transversal and/or longitudinal stiffeners provided to the cantilever beam to withstand post-buckling and lateral buckling moments according to the literature review carried out. It is equally important that the design of a part or component should have minimum weight and cost keeping the design secure in all loading conditions. Number of stiffeners, their location, and their dimensional properties are the affecting parameters and which influences the behaviour of the beam strength. In the present research, the bending moment and stress equations of a uniform cross-sectional hollow rectangular cantilever beam with stiffeners subjected to combined concentrated and uniformly distributed load (UDL) are derived using classical beam theory and the beam discretization performed using the Mohr's Moment Area Method (MMAM). Finite Element Analysis (FEA) is used to validate the results under known load and boundary conditions. The results demonstrate that the mathematical formulation can assist the design engineer in predicting the stresses developed in the cantilever beam under known loading and boundary conditions.