A Preliminary Study on Stainless Steel Hollow Flange Beams Featuring Lateral-Distortional Buckling

To explore the potential of using stainless steel structurally, extensive research has been carried out to study the structural behavior of stainless steel member as associated with the nonlinear stress-strain relationship. Hollow flange sections feature improved structural efficiency and a unique issue of web distortion. Steel hollow flange sections have been studied and commercially distributed (e.g. the very first HFB section and lately LSB section). As a proactive study, this paper investigates stainless steel hollow flange beams of double-symmetric section with numerical modeling and parametric analysis. The validity of the idealized FE model was verified with existing study on steel counterparts. Specifically, three alloys (S30401, S44330, S32101) and a series of sections and membe