Experimental setup for the evaluation of large displacements in the inflected beams sustained to ground

In engineering practice, it often occurs to tackle structures with systems of forces such as to induce displacements beyond the linear response. If the material remains in the elastic field, the behaviour is generally addressed as geometric non-linearity. Taking into consideration beam structures subjected to distributed and concentrated loads, the differential equations that describe the structural behavior need to be solved with numerical methods (e.g. Runge-Kutta algorithm or F.E.M.) or analytical perturbative approaches. This work presents experimental results concerning a beam, sustained to the ground, loaded to own weight and lifted by concentrated loads at the free-end. The loads are such as to cause very large displacements. The work describes some useful tricks to carry out the tests with good precision and repeatability. Several experimental data are compared with numerical results.