Torsion of closed section, orthotropic, thin-walled beams

The paper presents a theory for thin-walled, closed section, orthotropic beams which takes into account the shear deformation in restrained warping induced torque. In the derivation we developed the analytical (‘‘exact’’) solution of simply supported beams subjected to a sinusoidal load. The replacement stiffnesses which are independent of the length of the beam were determined from the exact solution by taking its Taylor series expansion with respect to the inverse of the length of the beam. The effect of restrained warping and shear deformation was investigated through numerical examples.