Moment-Rotation Characterization of Cold-Formed Steel Beams

Abstract
The objective of this study is to provide a prediction method for characterizing the complete moment-rotation (M-!) response of cold-formed steel (CFS) members in bending. The work is an ancillary effort related to the National Science Foundation funded Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) project: CFS-NEES (www.ce.jhu.edu/bschafer/cfsnees). The goal of CFS-NEES is to enable performance-based seismic design for cold-formed steel framed buildings. A basic building block of performance-based seismic design is nonlinear structural analysis. For cold-formed steel members, which suffer from local and distortional buckling, existing codes provide peak strength and approximations for stiffness loss prior to peak strength, but no estimation of post-peak M-! behavior. Complete M-! response is necessary for nonlinear structural analysis of CFS framed buildings. In this research, existing data, obtained by experiments and finite element analysis, are processed to examine the complete M-! response in cold-formed steel beams. Using a modification of the simplified model introduced in ASCE 41 for pushover analysis, the M-! response is parameterized into a simple multi-linear curve. The parameters include the initial stiffness, fully effective limit, reduced pre-peak stiffness, peak moment, post-peak plateau, and post-peak rotation at 50% of the peak moment. It is shown herein that the parameters of this multi-linear M-! curve may themselves be readily predicted as a function of either the local slenderness or distortional slenderness of the cross-section, as appropriate. Accuracy of the proposed M-! approximation is assessed. The impact of utilizing the full M-! response in a single and multi-span CFS beam is demonstrated. The proposed prediction method for M-! provides a necessary step in the development of nonlinear structural analysis of CFS systems.
Description
Keywords
Cold-formed steel beams, bending, cyclic, moment-rotation
Citation
Ayhan, D., Schafer, B.W. (2012). "Moment-Rotation Characterization of Cold-Formed Steel Beams" CFS-NEES Research Report. RR02.
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