Design of Cold‐Formed Stainless Steel Tubular Members. I: Columns

Abstract

The paper presents compression tests on square and circular stainless steel tubes, including stub column and long column tests. An important part of the test program was to quantify the increase in column strength resulting from cold work during the fabrication process. Tension and compression tests on coupons cut from finished tubes were also included in the test program, as were measurements of residual strains produced by the cold‐rolling process. A design method is proposed for stainless steel tubular columns. The method incorporates the increase in strength produced by the cold‐rolling process and is validated by comparing it to the test strengths. It is demonstrated that the proposed design procedure provides column strengths that are much closer to the test strengths than design strengths based on the annealed material properties. The design procedure proposed is an extension of that described in the