Stress analysis of generally asymmetric non-prismatic beams subject to arbitrary loads

Non-prismatic beams are widely employed in several engineering fields, e.g., wind turbines, rotor blades, aircraft wings, and arched bridges. While analytical solutions for variable cross-section desirable, a model describing all stress components with general variation of their under generalised loading remains an open important problem to solve. To partly address this issue, we propose solution recovery untwisted, asymmetric, non-prismatic smooth continuous taper shape loading, considering plane conditions isotropic materials undergoing small strains. The methodology follows Jourawski’s formulation, including the effect asymmetric cross-section, internal forces as known variables. We confirm non-triviality field beams, i.e., dependency on beam geometry shear transverse distributions. As particular novelty, new formulation direct includes derivatives, resulting greater accuracy than state-of-the-art models distributed conditions. Also, closed-form introduced linearly tapered, generally both rectangular cross-sections. For validation purposes, consider three different practical models: symmetric beam. results, checked against commercial finite element analysis, show that proposed predicts stress-field loads good levels accuracy. Traction-free boundary condition requirements naturally satisfied surfaces.