5. Conclusions

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

This document is an introduction to structural instability. It has no immediate purpose in terms of the project, but is intended for training purposes. Its aim is to introduce the main concepts relating to instability and to provide useful information for the sensible use of verification rules to be implemented in the context of projects.

The relationship between balance and stability was introduced intuitively.

On a practical level, the main basic phenomena of instability have been identified with a view to further in-depth analysis.

Conceptually, we introduced two types of elastic instability –: bifurcation instability and limit point instability (...