ABSTRACT
The extensive use of cold-formed steel Rectangular Hollow Section (RHS) profiles in thin-walled steel trusses has been growing steadily and at a fast rising pace. However, since these trusses normally consist of several slender structural members, joined together through bolted connections, which are highly susceptible to local and global buckling phenomena, the assessment of their structural response constitutes a fairly complex task (e.g., Wilkinson 1999). Indeed, in the context of numerical structural analysis, this task can only be rigorously carried out by resorting to complex shell finite element analysis, a computer-intensive approach that is both (i) very time-consuming (including data input and result interpretation) and (ii) prohibitive for routine applications at present (e.g., Moazed et al. 2009).
