Experimental Analysis of Beam-to-upright Connections in Cold-formed Steel Storage Pallet Racks

A research program is currently in progress at Department of Building Engineering of Tongji University with the aim of investigating the behavior of cold-formed steel storage pallet racks under static and dynamic loading. This paper presents preliminary experimental analysis on the monotonic behavior of beam-to-upright connections. In the experimentation, the set-up was specially designed to accommodate precise requirement of boundary conditions and the measurement method was refined from the general ones used in rack design codes. It is shown that deformation modes of the connections were similar before failure while the failure modes were different depending on the specific constructional details. Moment-rotation characteristic curves are obtained and compared. On the base of these curves, the main parameters controlling the stiffness and moment capacity of connections, such as thickness of upright section, depth of pallet beam section, construction of beam end connector (mainly the number of tabs) and the loading direction are discussed