While doing so, we encourage you to consider two questions:Ī curved pipe section with straight legs loaded in pure bending.Īpplying a moment on a boundary results in a varying surface traction. Now, imagine bending this pipe in the bend plane as indicated with the force arrows. The material is assumed to be isotropic and linear elastic. It consists of a 90 ° pipe bend with adjacent straight legs and a moderate-to-thin wall thickness. Take a look at the pipe model shown below. This blog post investigates one such case, where there are severe pitfalls of using beam theory, and the true structural behavior is surprisingly different. However, it’s also known that due to the simplicity and convenience, beam theory is applied even when some underlying assumption may not hold up too well. Using the equations can be beneficial when considering structural behavior, as they are easy to apply and provide useful results. For many structural engineers, beam theory is a popular analysis tool.
