A Computational Study on Buckling Behavior of Cold-Formed Steel Built-Up Columns Using Compound Spline Finite Strip Method

This paper presents a computational methodology to compute the critical buckling stress of built-up cold-formed steel columns joined with discrete fasteners. The fasteners are modeled as three-dimensional beam elements, and their effect is integrated into the spline finite strip framework, evolving the compound strip methodology. Although this technique has been presented in the literature, this paper presents yet another robust framework for the buckling load evaluation of compound cold-formed steel columns with arbitrarily located fasteners. The proposed framework is applied to study the effect of fasteners on the formation of local, distortional, and global buckling modes of built-up section and a comparison is drawn with the buckling behavior of a single section. In this study, the proposed formulations are also used to get insights into the stability behavior of single-span and multi-span compound cold-formed steel columns in the presence of (i) fasteners with varied spacings with respect to span and (ii) the presence of the additional restraining system such as wall panels. For different buckling modes, a significant increment in buckling stress for a built-up section from a single section is observed when the fastener spacing is kept less than the critical buckling half-wavelength of the respective buckling modes. The study on the effect of wall panels shows that in comparison to unsheathed wall studs, the sheathed wall studs that produce additional constraints lead to the elimination of the global buckling deformations. The proposed formulations are simple, yet rigorous and have been validated using finite element-based numerical results.