Production standards for cold-formed hollow structural sections

In recent years there has been a move to raise the level of requirements in a number of hollow section production standards, to generate a higher quality or higher performance product. This paper hence provides a contemporary overview of several prominent hollow section manufacturing standards and compares key geometric and material properties. Standards covered include those in Europe (EN), USA (ASTM, API), Canada (CSA), South Africa (SANS), China (GB) and Japan (JIS). Problems that have been encountered in North America and Asia with certain cold-formed square and rectangular hollow sections, particularly with regard to surface-finish, corner cracking and hot-dip galvanizing, are discussed. In addition, these same sections are now subject to constraints for seismic applications too, which has led to a fundamental re-appraisal of the cold-formed manufacturing specification in North America. Some features of the resulting proposed new ASTM manufacturing specification for cold-formed hollow sections are thus outlined.