Abstract

Nowadays, when high-strength materials are used in engineering design to create structures with slender shapes, the great important problem is to ensure their stability. There are many methods for evaluation of elastic critical buckling load for plane frames such as the load control method, the displacement control method, the finite element method,... In this paper, the authors propose another energy-based method called Discrete Element Method to analyze the stability of plane elastic frames. Using this method, the program DEAFRAME developed in Matlab is also presented to investigate a number of simple illustrative examples. Numerical results obtained are compared to those of the other methods, und indicate that this method is effective and simple to use.