Design of stainless steel CHS beam-columns

The EN 1993-1-4 (2015) design approach for stainless steel CHS beam-column members has been observed from prior experimental studies to provide capacity predictions that can be either overly conservative or unconservative depending upon the ratio of axial load to bending moment. Hence, a numerical parametric study has been undertaken to explore the buckling response of stainless steel CHS beam-columns, covering austenitic, duplex and ferritic grades with a wide range of local and global slendernesses and applied loading eccentricities. Over 2000 numerical results have been generated and used to assess new design proposals for stainless steel beam-columns, featuring improved compression and bending end points and new interaction factors. The new proposals are more consistent and, on average, 4% more accurate in their resistance predictions than the current EN 1993-1-4 (2015) design approach. The reliability of the existing and new proposals has been verified by means of statistical analyses according to EN 1990 (2005).