Cross-section buckling in cold-formed steel can be complicated: local buckling, distortional buckling, global buckling – their is a lot to take in. Cross-section elastic buckling analysis using the semi-analytical finite strip method provides an efficient means to develop elastic buckling predictions for any cold-formed steel shape. Our longstanding software CUFSM provides a means to handle these types of calculations and create the “signature curve” for any cold-formed steel shape. While the story is long the idea of this short blog post is to just give a quick insight on this signature curve. As the analysis sweeps through different buckling lengths – it sweeps through the different buckling modes – typical results are described in the following figure:
