Structural Engineering & Statics
where the load goes
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Buckling — the series

2 essays on one idea, from the one that introduces it to the one that assumes the rest.
  1. The column curve. Failure load against slenderness, as a fraction of the squash load. A stocky column crushes; a slender one buckles at the Euler load; the crossover is where the two curves meet, and real columns fall below both near it.

    Strong enough and still falls over

    A column can fail at a fraction of the load its material could carry, by going sideways. Buckling is a failure of stability rather than of strength, and it is decided by geometry.

    part 1 · stability
  2. A column that was never straight. Load against lateral deflection at mid-height, for a column starting with an initial bow of 0.002. There is no critical value to reach: the deflection grows from the first increment, slowly at first and then without bound as the ratio approaches 1.00 — which is the Euler load, and which the column therefore never attains. The perfect column, drawn for comparison, sits on the vertical axis until it arrives there and then has no answer at all.

    The column that was never straight

    Euler's load is the load at which a perfectly straight column becomes indifferent to being bent. No column is perfectly straight, so no column ever reaches it — and the load it never reaches can still be measured.

    part 2 · stability

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