Pperlich:
You said..., “It seems however that if the NA "jumps" from inside the centroid, to the centroid, then the stress distribution would also have a "jump" in it.” There is no jump, it is a gradual transition from the one to the other, over some finite length of beam. The structural member is continuous so the stresses must transition in some reasonable way, they can’t abruptly change, or you would be rippin things apart. Theory of Elasticity just won’t allow that. I used to do a lot of these calcs./designs, but it has been a long time since the last one, so I’d have to do some digging to refresh my thinking. I was comfortable with the approach I had developed and it was generally proven by strain gaging and FEA over some period of time. The N.A. shift is a function of the inner radius vs. the outer radius of the curved member. I would look at the straight beam condition near the shape change and the curved beam condition, and if I was happy with the stress picture in both, I didn’t much worry about the exact length or conditions in the transition length, that couldn’t be worse. The middle of the curved portion was usually the worst stress condition and you do have some complex shear stresses, radial stresses and normal bending stresses become circumferential stresses in t&b flanges, etc. At the tension flg., the flg. is pulled into the webs and at the compression flg., the flg. tries to rip away (is pushed away) from the webs, so the web to flg. welding becomes more complex.