Laterally braced cold-formed steel flexural members with edge stiffened flanges

The moment capacity of a laterally braced cold-formed steel flexural member with edge stiffened flanges (e.g., a channel or zee section) may be affected adversely by local or distortional buckling. New procedures for hand prediction of the buckling stress in the local and distortional mode are presented and verified. Numerical investigations are employed to highlight postbuckling behavior unique to the distortional mode. Compared with the local mode, the distortional mode is shown to have (1) heightened imperfection sensitivity, (2) lower postbuckling capacity, and (3) the ability to control the failure mechanism even in cases when the elastic buckling stress in the local mode is lower than in the distortional mode. Traditional design methods do not explicitly recognize distortional buckling, nor do they account for the observed phenomena in this mode. A new design method that integrates distortional buckling into the unified effective width approach, currently used in most cold-formed steel design specifications, is presented. For each element a local buckling stress and a reduced distortional buckling stress are compared to determine the effective width. Comparison with experimental tests shows that the new approach is more consistent and reliable than existing design methods.