ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The use of cold-formed thin-walled steel profiles in seismic structures is nowaday strongly penalized by code prescriptions, which impose for this kind of members a q-factor equal to 1, so that the design for the action of a severe earthquake must be carried out practically in the elastic field. On the other hand, some theoretical studies on the seismic performance of such structural systems gave encouraging results. For these reasons, a new experimental and theoretical research program on the behaviour of cold-formedmembers loaded by cyclic loads has been started by the authors. In this paper a brief presentation of the results obtained from tests in bending, under monotonic and cyclic load, on a number of unlipped channel beams, is given, a theoretical simulation of the flexural cyclic degrading behaviour is assessed and the collapse behaviour with reference to low-cycle fatigue resistance is analysed too.
