Experiment and Design Method on Cold-Formed Thin-Walled Steel Lipped Channel Columns with Slotted Web Holes Under Axial Compression

Cold-formed steel structural sections used in the walls of residential buildings and agricultural facilities are commonly C-shaped sections with web holes. These holes located in the web of sections can alter the elastic stiffness and the ultimate strength of a structural member. The objective of this paper is to study the buckling mode and load-carrying capacity of cold-formed thin-walled steel column with slotted web holes.

Compression tests were conducted on 26 intermediate length columns with and without holes. The tested compressive members included four different kinds of holes. For each specimen, a shell finite element Eigen-buckling analysis and nonlinear analysis were also conducted. The influence of the slotted web hole on local and distortional buckling response had also been studied. The comparison on ultimate strength between test results and calculated results using Chinese cold-formed steel specification GB50018-2002, North American cold-formed steel specification AISI S100-2016, and nonlinear Finite Element method was made.

Test results showed that the distortional buckling occurred for intermediate columns with slotted holes and the ultimate strength of columns with holes was less than that of columns without holes. The ultimate strength of columns decreased with the increase in transverse width of hole in the cross-section of member. The Finite element analysis results showed that the web holes could influence on the elastic buckling stress of columns. The shell finite element could be used to model the buckling modes and analysis the ultimate strength of members with slotted web holes. The calculated ultimate strength shows that results predicted with AISI S100-2016 and analyzed using finite element method are close to test results. The calculated results using Chinese code are higher than the test results because Chinese code has no provision to calculate the ultimate strength of members with slotted web holes.

The calculated method for cold-formed thin-walled steel columns with slotted web holes are proposed based on effective width method in Chinese code. The results calculated using the proposed method show good agreement with test results and can be used in engineering design for some specific cold-formed steel columns with slotted web holes studied in this paper.