Experimental and numerical investigation on cold-formed steel zed section beams with complex edge stiffeners

Abstract

This paper describes the experimental and numerical investigation on the flexural performance of cold-formed steel (CFS) zed section members bent about the neutral axis parallel to the flanges. In the test program, twelve pairs of zed section specimens fabricated from steel sheets of grades G450, G500 and G550 were loaded under four-point bending. Three series of sectional shapes, namely the zed sections with plain flanges as well as complex edge stiffeners consisting of double-fold inward and outward return lips, were devised for the test specimens. In the numerical investigation, the finite element model of four-point bending members, which was developed using ABAQUS and calibrated against the experimental results, was adopted to predict the behaviour of CFS unstiffened and edge-stiffened zed section beams over wide ranges of flange-to-web width ratio, lip-to-flange width ratio, return lip-to-lip width ratio and cross-sectional compactness. Furthermore, underpinned by the bending capacities acquired from the 12 experiments and 222 FE analyses in this study as well as 22 tests available in the literature, it was demonstrated that the current direct strength method (DSM) codified in the AISI S100 generally provided conservative flexural strength predictions for the unstiffened zed section members, while led to overall slightly unconservative design for the edge-stiffened zed section beams. In addition, based upon the DSM-based approaches that were addressed in the previous studies to account for the effect of local-distortional interaction, the nominal flexural strengths of the CFS zed section members with simple and complex edge stiffeners were found to be underestimated by 17% to 21% on average. Accordingly, the modified DSM formulae were recommended in this study for the CFS unstiffened and edge-stiffened zed section beams bent about the neutral axis parallel to the flanges.