PREDICTION OF COLLAPSED LOAD OF STEEL COLUMNS USING FINITE STRIP METHOD

The solution of inelastic bifurcation of column is the eigenvalue and eigenvectors which can be solved by many methods such as Power Method and William-Wittrick algorithm which has been proven to be efficient. This study utilised a new method of solution algorithm that utilizes the decomposition of the net assembled structural global matrix into the lower and upper triangles leading to the calculation of the determinant of the decomposed matrix. The product of the squared leading diagonals is the determinant which is the error of the present calculation. This method has been demonstrated to be about 0.02% error. The conventional Finite Strip Method is programmed with the new solution algorithm using an object oriented programming concept (Java). The method is compared with the published work and the agreement between the current work and the reported experimental and numerical work is excellent. Residual stress is successfully implemented with the new solution algorithm.