New approach to improving distortional strength of intermediate length thin-walled open section columns

This paper describes a method which can be adopted to improve the torsional and also distortional strength of thin-walled cold-formed steel columns used in pallet racking systems. Elastic buckling analysis on two different types of column sections of  intermediate length was done first in our study, after finding the buckling strength and mode of failure, the column sections were made distortionally stronger by adding simple spacers. Spacers are simple concentric tubes which are used to connect the flanges of open thin walled column sections (Fig. 3.). More than 22 laboratory experiments were carried out with different spacer spacing to asses the strength and behavior of these two different column sections. All these columns tested were investigated using finite element analysis software ANSYS [1]. The experimental results were verified with finite element analysis results obtained by solving the sections using ANSYS [1] software. Details of the experimentation and finite element analysis are presented here.