Numerical Investigation of Stainless Steel Welded I-Sections Subjected to Lateral-Torsional Buckling

Stainless steel is now widely used in construction as structural members in recognition to its unique beneficial properties such as corrosion resistance, higher strength and ductility, andnegligible maintenance cost. Recent research on stainless steel has seen development of rational design rules to predict cross-sectional resistances but still lacks in appropriate knowledge at the member level. The current paper investigates the lateral-torsional buckling (LTB) behaviour of welded stainless steel I sections. Available test results were used to develop and validate nonlinear finite element (FE) models. Limited experimental evidences were supplemented by a large number of reliable numerical results covering wider range of member slenderness ratio. All test and numerical results were used to investigate the performance of Eurocode EN-1993-1-4 and Australian code AS/NZS 4673 in predicting member resistances against lateral-torsional buckling.