On the stability of elastic curved bars

A general discussion about the stability of arbitrary elastic curved bars in space under combined actions of bending and twisting is given in this paper. A system of Eqs. (28)–(36) for perturbation functions near some equilibrium state is presented. With appropriate boundary conditions, the nontrivial solution corresponds to the critical state. Five examples are analysed in this paper. Some of them are new results and others are old problems treated using the new method.