The necessity to save steel leads to a marked tendency towards
thin-walled structures. Such structures are made of thin plating, the
behaviour - and, of course, design - of which is very significantly
affected by stability phenomena. In fact, with up-to-date thin-walled
steel plated structures, it is very frequently the point of view of
stability that governs the design. So it is not astonishing that the
attention of a great number of research teams in various parts of the
world has been for a good many years directed to investigations into
numerous aspects of the buckling behaviour of steel plated structures.
However, the current problems of buckling research, which require to
account for the effect of initial imperfections, post-buckled behaviour
and plastic reserve of strength (this leading in theoretical research to
the necessity to solve boundary value problems of geometrically and
physically non-linear partial differential equations, and in
experimental studies to conduct experiments on full-size test girders)
are very complex and time-consuming. Then it is beyond the means of one
investigator, or even of one research team, to deal successfully with
such problems and, conse- quently, effective cooperation is
indispensable. This was also the reason for the initiation of a fruitful
collaboration between the first author of this book (Assoc. Prof. J.
Djubek, D. Sc. ) and the third author (Assoc. Prof. M. Skaloud, D. Sc.