Design of Slender Angle Section Beam-Columns by the Direct Strength Method

This paper is concerned with the application of the direct strength method to equal angle section beam-columns with locally unstable legs. In contrast to existing design methods, which independently determine the compression and bending capacities and use an interaction equation to combine these, the direct strength method determines the elastic local buckling stress for the actual stress distribution resulting from the combined action of compression and bending, and incorporates the elastic buckling stress into a direct strength equation for beam-columns. In applying the method to equal leg angles, the torsional buckling mode is ignored when determining the overall buckling capacities, since it is accounted for through the local buckling mode, and the shift of the effective centroid is incorporated as an additional loading eccentricity. The shift in the effective centroid resulting from local buckling is determined from the actual stress distribution, as obtained using Stowell’s classical solution, in place of an effective cross section. The predicted strengths are conservative compared to tests on slender equal angle columns, and are shown to accurately predict the variation in load with applied loading eccentricity.