Proprietary scaffold structures are generally slender and normally fail by elastic instability. The elastic buckling load of a scaffold is affected by the stiffness of the connections. In proprietary scaffold structures these connections exhibit different behaviour under clock-wise and anti-clockwise rotations. The moment- rotation curves are highly non-linear and frequently have very low stiffnesses including the possibility of connection looseness with different loading and unloading curves. This paper describes a computer model developed to incorporate this non-linear joint behaviour and also includes the development of a three-dimensional stability function of the uprights including torsion. Good agreement has been achieved between theory and experiment. The results of the analysis show that the deflection behaviour of the scaffold is sensitive to the shape of the approximations used to model connection moment- rotation curves.
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