COLD FORMED STEEL DESIGN In steel construction, there are two main families of Structural members.

One is the familiar group of hot-rolled shapes and members built up of plates. The other, less familiar but of growing importance, is composed of sections cold formed from steel sheet, strip, plate, or flat bar in roll-forming machines or by press brake or bending brake operations. These are cold-formed steel structural members. The thickness of steel sheet or strip generally used in cold-formed steel structural members ranges from 0.378 mm to about 6.35 mm. Steel plates and bars as thick as 25.4 mm can be cold formed successfully into structural shapes. Although cold-formed steel sections are used in car bodies, railway coaches, various types of equipment, storage racks, grain bins, highway products, transmission towers, transmission poles, drainage facilities, and bridge construction, the discussions included herein are primarily limited to applications in building construction. For structures other than buildings, allowances for dynamic effects, fatigue, and corrosion may be necessary. In general, cold-formed steel structural members provide the following advantages in building construction: 1. As compared with thicker hot-rolled shapes, cold formed light members can be manufactured for relatively light loads and/or short spans. 2. Unusual sectional configurations can be produced economically by coldforming operations and consequently favorable strength-to-weight ratios can be obtained. 3. Nestable sections can be produced, allowing for compact packaging and shipping. 4. Load-carrying panels and decks can provide useful surfaces for floor, roof, and wall construction, and in other cases they can also provide enclosed cells for electrical and other conduits. 5. Load-carrying panels and decks not only withstand loads normal to their surfaces, but they can also act as shear diaphragms to resist force in their own planes if they are adequately interconnected to each other and to supporting members. Compared with other materials such as timber and concrete, the following qualities can be realized for cold formed steel structural members 1. Lightness 2. High strength and stiffness 3. Ease of prefabrication and mass production 4. Fast and easy erection and installation 5. Substantial elimination of delays due to weather 6. More accurate detailing 7. Nonshrinking and noncreeping at ambient temperatures 8. Formwork unneeded 9. Termite proof and rot proof 10. Uniform quality 11. Economy in transportation and handling Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

12. Noncombustibility 13. Recyclable material The combination of the above-mentioned advantages can result in cost saving in construction. TYPES OF COLD-FORMED STEEL SECTIONS AND THEIR APPLICATIONS Cold-formed steel structural members can be classified into two major types: 1. Individual structural framing members 2. Panels and decks

Figure 1: Cold-formed sections used in structural framing. 1. Individual Structural Framing Members Figure 1 shows some of the cold-formed sections generally used in structural framing. The usual shapes are channels (C-sections), Z-sections, angles, hat sections, I-sections, T-sections, and tubular members. 2 Panels and Decks Another category of cold-formed sections is shown in Fig. 2. These sections are generally used for roof decks, floor decks, wall panels, siding material, and bridge forms. Some deeper panels and decks are cold formed with web stiffeners. The depth of panels generally ranges from 38.1 to 191 mm, and the thickness of materials ranges from 0.457 to 1.91 mm.

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Figure 2: Decks, panels, and corrugated sheets. Stiffened and unstiffened elements If a plate's edges are restrained against buckling, then the force required to buckle the plate increases. If one edge is restrained (i.e. and "unstiffened" plate element) the force to cause out-of-plane buckling is less than that required to buckle a plate with two edges restrained against out-of-plane buckling. An intersecting plate at a plate edge adds a significant moment of inertia out of plane to the edge which prevents deflection at the attached edge. Figure 3 illustrates the modes of buckling for a stiffened and unstiffened plate element.

Figure 3: Plate buckling modes Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Figure 4: Unstiffened element Multiple stiffened elements A multiple-stiffened element is an element that is stiffened between webs, or between a web and a stiffened edge, by means of intermediate stiffeners which are parallel to the direction of stress (Figure 5).

Figure 5: Multiple stiffened compression element Flat width ratio, w The flat width w used in the design of cold-formed steel structural members is the width of the straight portion of the element and does not include the bent portion of the section. For unstiffened flanges, the flat width w is the width of the flat projection of the flange measured from the end of the bend adjacent to the web to the free edge of the flange, as shown in Fig. 6a. As shown in Fig. 6b, for a built-up section the flat width of the unstiffened compression element is the portion between the centre of the connection and the free edge. The flat width w of a stiffened element is the width between the adjacent stiffening means exclusive of bends, as shown in Fig. 7a. For the composite section shown in Fig. 7b, the flat width of the stiffened compression flange is the distance between the centres of connections.

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Figure 6: Flat width of unstiffened compression elements

Figure 7: Flat width of stiffened compression elements Effective Design Width, b The effective design width b is a reduced design width for computing sectional properties of flexural and compression members when the flat widththickness ratio of an element exceeds a certain limit. Figure 8 shows effective design widths of flexural and comparison members.

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Figure 8: Effective design width of flexural and compression members Sectional properties The properties of sections (cross-sectional area, moment of inertia, section modulus and radius of gyration) shall be determined in accordance with the conventional methods of structural design. Computation of properties of formed sections may be simplified by using a method called linear method in which the material of the section is considered concentrated along the central line of the steel sheet and the area elements replaced by straight or curved line elements. The thickness element t is introduced after the linear computation has been completed. The total area of the section is found from the relation Area = L x t' where L is the total length of all the elements. The moment of inertia of the section is found from the relation I = I^ x t where I^ is the moment of inertia of the central line of steel sheet. The section modulus is computed as usual by dividing I or (I^ x t ) by the distance from neutral axis to the extreme and not to the central line of extreme element. First power dimensions such as x, y and Y ( radius of gyration ) are obtained directly by the linear method and do not involve the thickness dimension. When the flat width w of a stiffened compression element is reduced for design purposes, the effective design width b is used directly to compute the total effective length Leffective of the line elements. The elements into which most sections may be divided for application of the linear method consist of straight lines and circular arcs. For convenient reference, the moments of inertia and location of centroid of such elements are identified in Fig. 9. The formula for line elements are exact, since the line as such has no thickness dimensions; but in computing the properties of an actual section, where the line element represents an actual element with a thickness dimension, the results will be approximate for the following reasons: a) The moment of inertia of a straight actual element about its longitudinal axis is considered negligible. b) The moment of inertia of a straight (actual) element inclined o the axis of reference is slightly larger than that of the corresponding line element, but for elements of similar length the error involved is even less than the error involved in neglecting the moment of inertia of the element about its longitudinal axis. Obviously, the error disappears when the element is normal to the axis. Small errors are involved in using the properties of a linear arc to find those of an actual corner, but with- the usual small corner radii the error in the location of the centroid of the corner is of little importance and the moment of inertia generally negligible. When the mean radius of a circular element is over four times its thickness, as for tubular sections and for sheets with circular corrugations, the error in using linear arc properties practically disappears.

Figure 9: Properties of line elements (continued)

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012

Figure 9: Properties of line elements

Manjunath V Bhogone, Assistant Professor, Civil Engineering Department Sinhgad College of Engineering, Pune 41

January 31, 2012