Analysis and design of cold-formed dimpled steel columns using Finite Element techniques

Dimpled steel products are produced from the combination of an innovative dimpling process and a traditional forming process such as cold-roll forming or press-braking. The wider use of cold-formed dimpled steel members has promoted considerable interest in the local instability and strength of these members. Of particular interest is their buckling behaviour and ultimate strength capacity in columns under compressive loading. However, the dimpling process produces cold-formed sections with a complex ‘dimpled’ surface topography and the ‘dimpled’ material is non-uniformly work hardened through the entire thickness. Owing to these complex issues, there are no existing analytical and design methods to calculate the buckling strength of dimpled products and validate against physical measurements. This paper presents the analysis of the compressive behaviour of cold-formed channel and lipped channel dimpled steel columns using Finite Element techniques. True stress–strain data obtained from physical tests were incorporated into nonlinear simulations of dimpled steel columns. It was found that the predicted buckling and ultimate loads correlated well with the experimental results. Based on the validated Finite Element results for different geometries, standard design formulae for determining buckling and ultimate loads of channel and lipped channel dimpled columns were developed. It is demonstrated that the Finite Element Analysis can therefore be used to analyse and design cold-formed dimpled steel columns.