Behaviour and design of structures using thin-walled cold-formed sections

Abstract

Cold formed steel sections have usually been used by the construction industry as secondary members e. g. sheeting, decking and purlins. In recent years several attempts have been made to manufacture pre-engineered structural systems using only cold-formed sections. This thesis is concerned with the overall and local behaviour of a novel form of space frame structure constructed entirely of thin-wall cold-formed channel sections and tubes. In order to obtain a better understanding of the complex behaviour of this system using doubly lipped channel sections a program of experiments on full size frames and individual components was undertaken. In addition to this a series of numerical solutions were obtained by using a non-linear elasto-plastic finite element program for both critical buckling and the ultimate capacity of doubly lipped channel sections.