Natural frequencies and buckling of compressed non-symmetric thin-walled beams

The experimental natural frequencies and buckling loads of aluminium slightly non-symmetric thin-Walled beams under axial force are compared with numerical results. A universal machine compressed the specimens by providing their ends with a relative axial displacement; suitable end constraints for warping were manufactured; PZT pickups, which revealed to be reliable in this field, helped extracting the natural frequencies under various compressive forces. An in-house code provided the corresponding numerical results, accounting for the effects of non-symmetric cross-sections and warping. The comparison provides a good agreement between the two sets of results, showing that the predictions of the code are verified by experiments, thus opening the way to possible applications in inverse problems.