Failure of thin-walled cold-formed members in compression is always characterized by a local plastic mechanisms, either a stub or slender column is referred. Starting from this observation, the authors suggest for the interactive local-overall buckling analysis to use instead of traditional "effective section", the sectional plastic mechanism strength. This is a new approach and for this reason it is compared with another one, namely the Direct Strength Method. Experimental results and advanced FEM simulations are used to evaluate the two methods. Comparisons with European and American relevant design codes are also presented in the paper.
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