Design of pallet rack upright frames subject to compression

Nowadays, cold-formed thin-walled structural members cover a wide range of applications, being indispensable to most current industries. One important application is the use of cold-formed profiles for pallet racks for storage systems. As the industries are developing rapidly, the demand of storage systems is bigger every day. Due to the high competition among rack manufacturers, efficient and accurate methods of determining the load carrying capacity of the rack structures are required. These methods have to be in accordance with the specified codes and regulations of the country where the pallet rack will be in service. The problem, which this paper is approaching, is the behaviour of pallet rack upright frames subject to compression. The purpose of the project is to compare design calculations performed according to the European methods and North-American methods, and experimental tests performed at Escola Tècnica Superior d’Enginyeria Industrial de Barcelona. The experiment was requested by the Rack Manufacturers Institute. According these results, an efficient method can be chosen and developed for analyzing racks. An important aspect of these types of structures is the failure mode and the types of buckling modes that occur in the columns. The thesis contains a brief presentation of the experiments that the project is based on, details about the software analyses performed in different programs: Consteel, Ansys-Mechanical APDL, CUSFM and CUTWP. The models used in the software analyses were carefully studied, in order to get a model that leads to ultimate load predictions similar to those obtained in the experimental tests. Different analytical analyses methods done according to the Eurocode and AISI will appear, accompanied by numerical examples, explanations, comparisons and discussions. By the end of this paper, a rack designer or manufacturer can choose the optimal solution for his problem, depending on his needs, the country for which the storage system is designed for.Incomin