STUB COLUMN TESTS AND FINITE ELEMENT MODELLING OF COLD-ROLLED ALUMINIUM ALLOY 5052 CHANNEL SECTIONS

Aluminium structural members are usually produced by extrusion. Recently, aluminum Z- and C-sections have been successfully cold-formed from aluminium coil using existing rollers for cold-formed steel sections. This paper presents an experimental program on cold-rolled aluminium C-sections subject to axial load. A total of twelve stub columns were performed at the University of Sydney under compressive loading condition between two fixed end supports. Three different commercially available lipped C-sections with different slenderness were chosen for testing, and subsequently analysed numerically using the Finite Element Method (FEM). The FEM models incorporating measured input parameters such as the material properties and actual initial geometric imperfections are compared with the experimental results. Depending on the slenderness of the sections, it was observed in the experiments that local buckling occurred quite early and that the sections exhibited extensive post-local buckling reserve strength. The behaviour and strengths obtained experimentally and numerically are discussed in this paper.