Standardised Material Properties for Numerical Parametric Studies of Structural Stainless Steel Elements

Abstract

A numerical study of stainless steel structural elements is presented in this paper. Firstly following examination of available material test data, representative mean values for the key strength and ductility parameters for different structural stainless steel products have been proposed. These include the yield stress fy, the ultimate tensile stress fu, the strain at ultimate tensile stress εu and the Ramberg-Osgood model parameters n and m. This enables the generation of standardised stress-strain curves for typical austenitic, duplex and ferritic stainless steel sections. Following this, a comprehensive numerical modelling study, incorporating the proposed representative material parameters, was carried out to investigate the effect of production route (cold-formed and hot-finished) and material grade (austenitic, duplex and ferritic) on the flexural buckling behaviour and design of stainless steel square, rectangular and circular hollow section compression members. The FE generated flexural buckling data, combined with column test data from the literature, were used to derive a series of buckling curves for the design of stainless steel compression members. The suitability of the proposals was confirmed by means of reliability analysis