According to the stationary principle of potential energy and the generalized coordinate method, a stiffness matrix of a beam element considering distortion effects is derived. Using the stiffness matrix of the beam element, a finite element program for computing thin-walled box steel beams is developed. And the program can take the section distortion and warping effects into account. The influences of diaphragm spacing on the mechanical behavior of thin-walled box beams are analyzed by the program. The numerical analysis shows that setting diaphragms have the greatest influence on the distortion normal stress, while there is very little influence on the bending normal stress. Only when the distance of adjacent diaphragms decreases to a certain value, will the distortion normal stress in the thin-walled box beam obviously reduce under the distortion load. Finally, a distortion-warping coefficient γ is introduced for simplifying the calculation of the longitudinal normal stress of thin-walled box beams. When the ratio of diaphragms adjacent space L to the maximum section dimension H is less than 2, the distortion-warping coefficient γ tends to one, which means that the distortion normal stress of the thin-walled box beam tends to zero, and the effect of the section distortion can be ignored.
