Structural design for non-linear metallic materials

The material stress-strain behaviour of structural carbon steel may be suitably accurately reflected for design purposes by an idealised elastic, perfectly-plastic material model; such material behaviour lends itself to the concept of section classification. There are, however, a number of structural materials, such as aluminium, stainless steel and some high strength, cold-worked steels, where this idealised model becomes inaccurate due to non-linearity of the stress-strain response below the yield point and considerable strain hardening beyond the yield point. Resulting design methods, developed on the basis of the idealised material behaviour, are necessarily overly conservative. A new method has been developed that utilises a more accurate material model and a continuous measure of cross-section deformation capacity (rather than the discretised system of section classification) to provide more rational and efficient designs. This paper describes the basis for the proposed design method and presents a comparison with results obtained from laboratory testing and those predicted by the current Eurocode approach. The proposed design method offers average increases in member resistances of around 20% over the current Eurocode approach, and a reduction in scatter of the prediction. © 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.