5. Conclusions

Instability must be taken into account in slender structures or structural elements that are wholly or partially loaded in compression.

This dossier is an introduction to structural instability. It has no immediate end in view for the project, but is intended as a training tool. It aims to introduce the main concepts relating to instability and to provide useful information for the reasoned use of verification rules to be implemented in the context of projects.

The relationship between equilibrium and stability was introduced intuitively.

On a practical level, the main basic instability phenomena have been identified for further analysis.

Conceptually, we introduced the two types of elastic instability – by bifurcation and by limit point – and reviewed their characteristics and properties...