Experimental study of cold-drawn duplex stainless steel circular tubes under axial compression

Abstract

Cold-drawing is one of the typical cold-forming techniques in producing stainless steel circular hollow sections (CHS). Compared with cold-rolling, cold-drawing can produce large scale stainless steel tubes which have wide applications in highly corrosive environment. Nevertheless, few researches have been carried out on the duplex stainless steel CHS columns. In this paper, cold-drawn duplex S22053 stainless steel CHS of three types of cross-sections were tested, including 8 material tensile coupon tests, 6 axially compressed stub column tests and 7 axially compressed long column tests. The material stress-strain curves of the cold-drawn CHS tubes, ultimate loads and failure modes of the stub and long columns were obtained. It has been revealed that material properties of cold-drawn stainless steel CHS tubes are close to those of the virgin plate in the annealed state. Moreover, all the stub columns show local buckling in “elephant foot” mode, while all the long columns undergo overall flexural buckling, among which a long column specimen with the nominal length of 700 mm（CHS-700） shows local buckling after the peak load due to the interaction of axial compression and second-order bending moment. Furthermore, comparing the test values with the predicted values based on the European, American, Australian/New Zealand and Chinese design codes, and the calculation methods available in literatures, it is concluded that the predicted values of the stub columns and the long columns with relatively large member slenderness are all lower than the test values, while the predicted values using the design methods except that in the Chinese design code are higher than the test values for the long columns with relatively small member slenderness. Chinese design code could provide safety predictions for cold-drawn duplex stainless steel CHS columns.