The purpose of the work presented in this thesis is to implement co-rotational beam elements and branch-switching procedures in order to analyse elastic and elastoplasticinstability problems. For the 2D beam elements, the co-rotational framework is taken from Crisfield [23]. The main objective is to compare three different local elasto-plastic elements. The 3D co-rotational formulation is based on the work of Pacoste and Eriksson [73],with new items concerning the parameterisation of the finite rotations, the definitionof the local frame, the inclusion of warping effects through the introduction of aseventh nodal degree of freedom and the consideration of rigid links. Differenttypes of local formulations are considered, including or not warping effects. It isshown that at least some degree of non-linearity must be introduced in the localstrain definition in order to obtain correct results for certain classes of problems. Within the present approach any cross-section can be modelled, and particularly, the centroid and shear center are not necessarily coincident.Plasticity is introduced via a von Mises material with isotropic hardening. Numericalintegration over the cross-section is performed. At each integration point, theconstitutive equations are solved by including interaction between the normal andshear stresses. Concerning instabilities, a new numerical method for the direct computation of elasticcritical points is proposed. This is based on a minimal augmentation procedure asdeveloped by Eriksson [32–34]. In elasto-plasticity, a literature survey, mainly concernedwith theoretical aspects is first presented. The objective is to get a completecomprehension of the phenomena and to give a basis for the two branch-switchingprocedures presented in this thesis.A large number of examples are used in order to assess the performances of the elements and the path-following procedures. / QC 20100512