ABSTRACT
Over the past few years, a large increase in the use of stainless steel in civil construction has been observed worldwide. Despite its high initial cost, the use of stainless steel in engineering constructions presents a series of factors that contribute to its adoption. At the same time, there is also an increase of hollow structural sections in civil engineering constructions, due to its excellent compression, torsion and bending capabilities. This paper describes an investigation centred on the structural response of pinned stainless steel square tubular columns. An austenitic stainless steel grade 304 was selected due to its popularity in structural designs. Experimental, numerical and theoretical models contemplating the EN1993-1-4 and the Continuous Strength Method (CSM) are presented. The results allowed some conclusions regarding the conservatism of EN1993-1-4. In contrast, both theoretical methods presented considerable differences in comparison to the performed experiments.
