An investigation into high strength cold-formed steel profiled deckings under concentrated lateral loads

This paper presents an experimental and numerical investigation into the structural behaviour of high strength cold-formed steel profiled deckings under concentrated lateral loads. A total of 28 web crippling tests on re-entrant profiled deckings with a nominal yield strength at 550 N/mm2 are performed to provide data for direct comparison with design resistances according to codified methods. Moreover, advanced three-dimensional finite element models with material, geometrical and boundary non-linearity are established to simulate the web crippling behavior of profiled deckings during the entire deformation ranges. Comparison on both the web crippling resistances and the deformed shapes at failure between the test and the numerical results is found to be highly satisfactorily. It is demonstrated that lateral restraints are very important to the web crippling behaviour of high strength cold-formed steel profiled deckings, and the proposed finite element models are effective to predict such behaviour in profiled deckings under practical loading and boundary conditions.