Flexural Buckling of Hot-Finished High-Strength Steel SHS and RHS Columns

An experimental and numerical study of the flexural buckling behavior of hot-finished high-strength steel (HSS) square and rectangular hollow section (SHS and RHS, respectively) columns is described in this paper. A total of 30 hot-finished S460 and S690 hollow section column specimens have been tested in compression with pin-ended boundary conditions. Finite element (FE) models have been developed to replicate the experiments and employed in a subsequent parametric study considering a range of member geometries. Based on the test and FE results, the applicability of the current column design curves in European, North American, Chinese and Australian structural steel design standards to hot-finished HSS SHS and RHS columns has been verified by means of reliability analyses.