A New Innovative Design Concept: Thin-walled Corrugated Steel Columns

摘要

This paper presents a new innovative design concept, "thin-walled corrugated steel columns", primarily to be used in highway bridges as an alternative to thin-walled steel columns. Compared with the traditional design concepts, this new innovative concept might results in cost-effective designs, with high stiffness and improved buckling behavior under combined axial and flexural loading, caused by earthquake excitations. Using a finite element model, that takes the non-linear material properties into consideration, it is shown that the corrugations will act like longitudinal stiffeners that are supporting each other, thus improving the buckling behavior and allowing for reduction of the overall wall thickness of the column.