Abstract
This paper investigates the effects of thermal load and shear force on the buckling of nanobeams. Higher-order shear deformation beam theories are implemented and their predictions of the critical buckling load and post-buckled configurations are compared to those of Euler-Bernoulli and Timoshenko beam theories. The nonlocal Eringen elasticity model is adopted to account a size-dependence at the nano-scale. Analytical closed form solutions for critical buckling loads and post-buckling configurations are derived for proposed beam theories. This would be helpful for those who work in the mechanical analysis of nanobeams especially experimentalists working in the field. Results show that thermal load has a more significant impact on the buckling behavior of simply-supported beams (S-S) than it has on clamped-clamped (C-C) beams. However, the nonlocal effect has more impact on C-C beams that it does on S-S beams. Moreover, it was found that the predictions obtained from Timoshenko beam theory are identical to those obtained using all higher-order shear deformation theories, suggesting that Timoshenko beam theory is sufficient to analyze buckling in nanobeams.