Nonlinear buckling of built-up cold-formed sections

摘要

An extensive numerical analysis was conducted to investigate the nonlinear buckling of built-up cold-formed sections. This paper presents the calibration of nonlinear finite element models to handle nonlinear buckling behaviour of cold-formed steel sections with geometrically unstable configurations. The two nonlinear finite element packages ANSYS and ABAQUS were used to validate 265 experimental tests. Two different numerical schemes (implicit static and explicit dynamic) under various iterative and non-iterative solution techniques, including Newton-Raphson, Arc-Length, Riks, and Central-Difference integration methods, were adopted to produce reliable solutions. Overall, the numerical analysis estimated the experimental results reasonably well with an adjustment factor of 0.88.