CRITICAL MOMENT OF ASYMMETRIC COLD-FORMED C-SECTIONS

In this paper the elastic lateral torsional buckling of thin-walled beams with asymmetric cross-sections is investigated. First the results of analytical solution and results of a special shell finite element solution are compared, then parametric studies are performed. In the parametric studies lipped channel section beams are investigated. The beams are simply supported and subjected to uniform bending moment, however, the cross-section is systematically varied, by considering perfect mono-symmetric cross-sections the geometries of which are then systematically perturbed to achieve virtually all kinds of asymmetric channel sections. The numerical results show that the effect of any of the cross-section parameters on the critical moment can be very well approximated by quadratic functions. It has also been concluded that the critical moment is most sensitive to the variation of the flange width.