Buckling Failure of Compressed Cellular Members

Structural cellular members are more economical in material use than plain-webbed members because of the large openings present in their web. Consequently, these members are mostly used for applications in which they are primarily loaded in bending, but they are also used for applications in which they are loaded by an axial compressive force combined with a relatively large bending moment. In the latter loading condition, the behaviour of cellular members is still unknown and is currently being investigated. As a part of this more extensive research, the authors studied the failure behaviour of simply supported, doubly symmetric cellular members loaded by an axial compressive force and proposed a design approach to calculate the ultimate failure load. In this paper, the results of a preliminary study are presented, which demonstrates that the proposed design approach could lead to acceptable results, depending on the effect of the residual stresses.