Elastic distortional buckling of cold-formed steel Z-Beams with stiffened holes using reduced thickness

For several reasons, cold-formed steel (CFS) beams are often manufactured with holes. Nevertheless, because of holes, the reduction in the web area causes a decrease in the bending strength. Edge stiffeners are presently added around the holes to improve the bending strength of flexural members. Therefore, this research studies CFSZ-beams with stiffened holes and investigates how edge stiffener affects bending strength and failure modes. Nonlinear analysis was carried out using ABAQUS software and the developed finite element (FE) model was verified against tests from previous studies. Using the verified FE model, a parametric study of 104 FE models was conducted to investigate the influence of key parameters on bending strength of Z- sections. The results indicated that the effect of holes is less noticeable in very thin Z-sections. Moreover, adding edge stiffeners around the holes improves the flexural capacity of Z-beams and sometimes restores the original bending capacity. Because the computational techniques used to solve the CFS buckling mode with stiffened holes are still unclear, a numerical method using constrained and unconstrained finite strip method (CUFSM) software was proposed to predict the elastic distortional buckling moment for a wide variety of CFSZ-sections with stiffened holes. A numerical method with two procedures was applied and validated. Upon comparison, the numerical method accurately predicted the distortional buckling moment of CFS Z-sections with stiffened holes.