Did you know that you could use Consteel to perform local and distortional buckling checks for cold-formed members?

First, sections must be loaded into the model. To load cold-formed sections, you can choose from four options: From library, Macro section, Draw section, or My library.

After the first-order and buckling analyses are completed, you can proceed to the Ultimate limit state check settings and enable the steel design cross-section and buckling checks. At the bottom of the steel design section, there is an option to Consider the supplementary rules from EN 1993-1-3 for the design of cold-formed sections. This checkbox must be selected if you want to design cold-formed sections.

When the calculation is finished, by opening the Section module, we can review all the properties of the Effective section of the elastic plate segment model. By opening each plate element, we can verify the length, effective length, thickness, effective thickness, slenderness, and reduction factor separately. In addition, the properties of the stiffeners can also be verified: area, moment of inertia, lateral spring stiffness, critical stress, reduction factor, compressive stress, reduced effective area, and reduced thickness.

Similarly, the stresses can also be checked from the Properties tab. In the colored figure or diagram view, all the calculated stresses can be seen together with their resultants.

Consteel automatically takes into account the effect of distortional buckling when calculating the effective sections of cold-formed thin-walled sections.

Moving on to the Standard resistance tab in the Section module, all calculated results can be verified, not only the dominant one. By opening the Global stability resistance check, we can see that, since we enabled the option to consider the supplementary rules from EN 1993-1-3 for the design of cold-formed sections, results are available both according to EN 1993-1-1 and according to EN 1993-1-3.

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