Application of American Aluminum Specification in Design of Cold-Rolled Aluminum Alloy Channel Columns

Abstract

Cold-rolled aluminum sections are new products that are available in the market with two typical sections of channel and Zed sections. These sections in the form of thin-walled sections become sensitive to buckling instabilities, leading to different behaviors in comparison with those of traditional extruded aluminum sections. The current aluminum design standards were regulated on the basis of research studies on extruded aluminum sections, and their accuracies in the design of cold-rolled aluminum members have been not reported. Based on collected experimental and numerical strengths of cold-rolled aluminum channel columns, the paper will compare these collected data with the strengths predicted by American Aluminum Specification. The comparisons are the bases to provide recommendations for the application of American Aluminum Specification in the design of cold-rolled aluminum channel columns. This specification was found to give conservative predictions for global buckling failure modes and provide un-conservative predictions for local-global interaction buckling failure modes in the design of aluminum alloy channel columns.