Exact matching condition at a joint of thin-walled box beams under out-of-plane bending and torsion

To take into account the flexibility resulting from sectional deformations of a thin-walled box beam, higher-order beam theories considering warping and distortional degrees of freedom (DOF) in addition to the Timoshenko kinematic degrees have been developed. The objective of this study is to derive the exact matching condition consistent with a 5-DOF higher-order beam theory at a joint of thin-walled box beams under out-of-plane bending and torsion. Here we use bending deflection, bending/shear rotation, torsional rotation, warping, and distortion as the kinematic variables. Because the theory involves warping and distortion that do not produce any force/moment resultant, the joint matching condition cannot be obtained just by using the typical three equilibrium conditions. This difficulty poses considerable challenges because all elements of the 5 × 5 transformation matrix relating the field variables of one beam to those in another beam should be determined. The main contributions of the investigation are to propose additional necessary conditions to determine the matrix and to derive it exactly. The validity of the derived joint matching transformation matrix is demonstrated by showing good agreement between the shell finite element results and those obtained by the present box beam analysis in various angle box beams.