Strength buckling predictions of cold-formed steel built-up columns

The aim of this paper is to propose a design procedure for predicting the buckling strength of built-up, cold-formed steel columns based on the two well known methods; the effective width method and the Direct Strength Method. Several design approaches, based on different elastic buckling solutions, were considered in this investigation. Traditional hand methods, without interaction effects between the different modes, and a new numerical spline finite strip method were used to predict the buckling stresses. All of the proposed methods were compared with experimental data on plain and lipped, built-up columns. Results have shown that the effective width approaches are more accurate than the Direct Strength Method. However, both methods can be investigated using more experimental data to assess a practical design method for built-up columns.