Assessment of Eurocode 3 Shear Design Provisions for Cold‐Formed Steel Beams with Web Holes

Cold‐formed steel beams are often provided with web holes to accommodate service conduits. These web holes result in reduced structural strength. Accurate estimation of the structural strength, including shear strength, is crucial during the design phase. There are a lot of studies available in the literature investigating the shear strength reduction in cold‐formed steel beams due to web holes. However, the experiments and parametric finite element results were not assessed against Eurocode 3 shear design provisions. Therefore, the shear design of cold‐formed steel beams with web holes is investigated herein. Existing experimental and parametric finite element analysis data on cold‐formed steel beams with circular web holes were collected from the literature. The accuracy of the current Eurocode 3 shear design provisions was then assessed using the collected data. The comparisons showed that the current Eurocode 3 shear design provisions were not suitable to estimate the shear strength of cold‐formed steel beams with web holes. Finally, Eurocode 3 shear design provisions are extended to capture the effect of web holes and verified against the available shear tests and finite element results. It was found that the new extended shear design proposal offers improved accuracy and consistency in shear strength predictions.