ABSTRACT
The lateral (or flexural-torsional) buckling of structural (or mild steel) prismatic I-section beams is well-established (Trahair 1993, Trahair & Bradford 1998) and design rules in codes of practice such as AS4100 (Standards Australia 1998) are familiar to structural engineers. The basis of the design rules is a so-called “beam curve”, which is a semi-empirical reflection of the interaction of elastic buckling, yielding and residual stresses to express the buckling strength as a function of the beam slenderness. It is well-known that HSS members have significantly different stress-strain characteristics and residual stress distributions to those of mild steel, and these may potentially manifest themselves in buckling-based strength rules for HSS that are different from those for mild steel. However, despite the increasing use of HSS members, surprisingly little research on their stability appears in the open literature.
