Development of Flexural Buckling Rules for the New AISC Stainless Steel Design Specification

Abstract

AbstractThis paper presents the development of flexural buckling curves for austenitic and duplex stainless steel welded I‐sections and structural hollow sections, which are proposed for implementation in the new AISC stainless steel specification. The proposed buckling curves were developed following the same type of reliability analysis employed to develop the flexural buckling curve included in AISC 360 Specification for Structural Steel Buildings for carbon steel, considering all the experimental data available in the literature and a large number of numerical results. In order to facilitate their implementation, the proposed curves follow a similar form as the AISC‐type of curve included in AISC 360, with the only differences being the addition of a yield plateau and the values of selected coefficients used to adjust the shape of the curves.Three different buckling curves are proposed: one buckling curve for circular hollow section (CHS) columns and I‐section columns buckling about the major axis; one for rectangular hollow section (RHS) columns; and one for I‐section columns buckling about the minor axis. The proposed curves represent a significant improvement with respect to the currently available stainless steel flexural buckling curve included in AISC Design Guide 27, providing an increase in strength predictions of up to 55%.