Experimental investigation on flexural behaviour of stainless steel beams

Stainless steel elements have been increasingly used in the construction industry, especially in architectural applications, due to its high corrosion resistance, ease of maintenance and aesthetics. The most important limiting factors restraining structural applications of stainless steel are the lack of knowledge about their resistant properties among designers. This factor has inspired researchers to explore the structural behaviour of the material and develop design rules to exploit this material to its full potential in construction. This paper aims to present two experimental programmes on stainless steel beams. Information provided by instrumentation in the tests enables us to observe the non-linear behaviour of stainless steel and to reach some useful conclusions for designing stainless steel structures. Experimental results show that current design provisions for this new construction material are clearly conservative.