Fundamental closed-form solutions for solid and thin-walled composite beams including a complete out-of-plane warping model

model for predicting the structural behavior of composite beams is presented. The model includes a three-dimensional warping distribution and is designed to handle arbitrary solid cross-sections or general thin-walled geometries. The formulation enables the derivation of fundamental strength-of-materials type closed-form analytic solutions for various basic composite beam configurations and loading modes. These fundamental solutions explicitly identify the origin of the elastic couplings and supply educating insight into the structural mechanisms in composite beams. In addition, the detailed distributions of the out-of-plane warping provided by the present analytic solutions for relatively simple geometries may be used as the basic shear deformation shape functions in numerical analyses of more complex configurations. [/": 1998 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.