Copyright © 2012 Chainarong Athisakul et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a large deflection of variable-arc-length beams, which are made from nonlinear elastic materials, subjected to its uniform self-weight. The stress-strain relation of materials obeys the Ludwick constitutive law. The governing equations of this problem, which are the nonlinear differential equations, are derived by considering the equilibrium of a differential beam element and geometric relations of a beam segment. The model formulation presented herein can be applied to several types of nonlinear elastica problems. With presence of geometric and material nonlinearities, the system of nonlinear differential equations becomes complicated. Consequently, the numerical method plays an important role in finding solutions of the presented problem. In this study, the shooting optimization technique is employed to compute the numerical solutions. From the results, it is found that there is a critical self-weight of the beam for each value of a material constant . Two possible equilibrium configurations (i.e., stable and unstable configurations) can be found when the uniform self-weight is less than its critical value. The relationship between the material constant and the critical self-weight of the beam is also presented.