Friends of Cold-Formed Steel
In case you have not already heard, the CFSRC Colloquium will not be held in 2024. The cold-formed steel industry in the U.S. is going through a bit of a transition, and one casualty of that change was the sustaining funding to the Cold-Formed Steel Research Consortium (CFSRC), the organization that I led and which organized the Colloquium. All of the excellent research from the Colloquium will continue to be permanently stored at the Johns Hopkins library, as it has been from the inception.
For those who have not heard the news, the short version is (1) the CFS industry is doing very well in the U.S., with lots of projects and advances, but (2) the funding models in the background have shifted and this in part led to the American Iron and Steel Institute (AISI) exiting construction standards. A number of organizations have stepped up to fill the void, most notably the Steel Deck Institute is temporarily managing the former AISI Standards so that they maintain all legal status necessary in the U.S. SDI is even holding meetings to keep the volunteers engaged as the transition to what’s next is determined. In addition, a new working group from across the steel industry is now meeting and developing future options. I am optimistic that by this time in 2025 the U.S. CFS industry will be back on a clear path and funding and operating standards, outreach, advocacy, and research – but in the meanwhile things remain a bit in flux.
So, where to take and share your latest great CFS research? Personally, I am moving some of my efforts to the Cold-Formed Steel Engineering Institute (CFSEI). The current president of CFSEI is CFSRC’s own Professor Kara Peterman, and I am a past-president. CFSEI has grown substantially in the last 10 years and holds an excellent annual conference with hundreds of practicing cold-formed steel engineers, and we are working to expand their CFSEI expo to have additional research sharing as well. Of course, the SSRC meetings at the NASCC conference are another excellent opportunity for sharing, as is the SEI Structures Congress. And we still have international conferences such as ICTWS, ICSAS, SDSS, ICASS, ASCCS, and many more. So, while I hope to be a part of a biennial CFS specialty conference in the future (it was a great tradition established by CCFSS), I am sure we will all manage.
Just a couple of additional notes about the vibrancy of cold-formed steel research. In the last 20 years our community went from 36 papers in Scopus in 2003, to 388 in 2023 – 10X increase! Later this year the CFS-NHERI team combined with incredible contributions from industry partners will begin construction on shake table testing of a 10-story CFS building – cfs10! If you aren’t following the CFS LinkedIn community you are missing amazing posts by so many people celebrating incredible solutions in CFS – I will highlight just this one manufacturer for consistently highlighting the best in the world. Also, if you like the nerdy stuff, thanks in particular to Professor Sheng Jin my elastic buckling software CUFSM is back under active development on github with all sorts of new tools and features being provided.
So many of you contribute to making CFS a fun place to do research. Thank you for that, and I look forward to seeing many of you at conferences, meetings, and in email and the like.
All the best,
Ben Schafer
Former Director, Cold-Formed Steel Research Consortium
Professor, Johns Hopkins University
Lover of buckling phenomena