Nonlinear behavior of cold-formed stainless steel built-up box sections under axial compression

Abstract

Stainless steel is a highly versatile material, possessing a unique selection of properties that can be exploited in structural (load bearing) applications. In cold-formed steel structures, such as trusses, wall frames and portal frames, the use of built-up cold-formed stainless steel box sections as compression members are becoming popular. The AISI/ASCE Standard, SEI/ASCE-8–02 and AS/NZS do not include the design of stainless-steel built-up channels and very few experimental tests or finite element analyses have been reported in the literature for such face to-face cold-formed stainless-steel channel box sections. Thus, this paper presents a numerical investigation on the behavior of cold-formed stainless-steel built-up channel box sections. Three different grades of stainless steel i.e., duplex EN1.4462, ferritic EN1.4003 and austenitic EN1.4404 were considered. Effect of screw spacing on the axial strength of such built-up channel box sections was investigated. As expected, most of the short and intermediate columns failed by either local–global buckling interaction or just by local buckling, whereas the long columns, failed by global buckling. A comprehensive parametric study was carried out covering a wide range of slenderness and different cross-sectional geometries to assess the performance of the design guidelines by AISI and AS/NZS. In total, 180 finite element models were analyzed. From the results of the parametric study, it was found that the AISI and AS/NZS are conservative by around 15% for duplex grade (EN1.4462) of stainless-steel built-up box columns. However, for ferritic (EN1.4003) and austenitic (EN1.4404) grades of stainless-steel built-up box columns, the AISI and AS/NZS were conservative by only 5%.