The floor beams of steel buildings, cold-formed steel floor joists in particular, often require large web openings, which may affect their shear capacities. A cost effective way to mitigate the detrimental effects of such openings is to weld/fasten reinforcements. A difficulty associated with an experimental investigation to establish suitable reinforcement schemes for openings in shear zone is...

Open cross-section, thin-walled, cold-formed steel columns have at least three competing buckling modes: local, distortional, and Euler ~i.e., flexural or flexural-torsional! buckling. Closed-form prediction of the buckling stress in the local mode, including interaction of the connected elements, and the distortional mode, including consideration of the elastic and geometric stiffness at the w...

A series of tests on cold-formed steel (CFS) wall plate system subjected to uplift force at the mid span of the wall plate is presented. The aim of the study was to study the behaviour and identify the modes of failure of CFS wall plate system. Two parameters were considered in these studies: 1) different dimension of U-bracket at the supports and 2) different sizes of lipped Cchannel. The lipp...

Laminar structures have a high post-buckling strength reserve. Cold-formed steel profiles can be taken as a set of thin plate elements. Therefore it is necessary to design this type of profiles taking into account that reserve of strength in post-local buckling modes of failure. The method normally used to design this type of structures is based on the Effective Width concept. The Effective Wid...

Cold-formed steel roof truss systems that use complex stiffener patterns in existing hat shape members for both top and bottom chord elements are a growing trend in the North American steel framing industry. When designing cold-formed steel sections, a structural engineer typically tries to improve the local buckling behavior of the cold-formed steel elements. The complex hat shape has proved t...

This series of experiments aims to characterize the cyclic behavior of cold-formed steel (CFS) stud-to-sheathing connections. This connection provides the key energy dissipating behavior in wood sheathed CFS shear walls, and provides bracing to the studs under gravity and out-of-plane loads. A simple testing rig is developed consisting of two CFS lipped channels facing toe-to-toe connected on t...

This paper presents a series of tests on cold-formed stainless steel bolted connections. The test specimens were fabricated from three different types of stainless steel, including austenitic stainless steel EN1.4301 (AISI 304) and EN1.4571 (AISI 316Ti having small amount of titanium) as well as lean duplex stainless steel EN1.4162 (AISI S32101). The material properties of the three types of st...

The objective of this paper is to provide a state of the art review of the application of yield-line analysis to cold-formed steel members, and present a newly developed solution to the stresses that develop in an inclined yield-line. Yield-line analysis in cold-formed steel members is shown to be distinct from traditional yield-line applications. Challenges in the application of yield-line ana...