Lateral Buckling of the Struts in Beam String Structures Considering the Layout of Strings

The struts in a beam string structure (BSS) may buckle laterally under compression. The lateral buckling of the struts is determined not only by the rotational stiffness of the beam–strut joints and the length and bending stiffness of the struts, but also by the rise and lateral stiffness of the beam, the number of struts, and the layout of strings. In this paper, the multi-strut BSS with several types of layout of strings is studied. An analytical method for estimating the lateral buckling load of the struts in BSS is proposed. Parametric studies are carried out to investigate the variation of the lateral buckling of the struts in the BSS for different string layouts. In the end, the validity of the proposed method is examined by means of numerical simulations using the geometrically nonlinear finite element method.