Adam Trouncer

B.E (Hons.) B.Comm
Postgraduate Research Student




School of Civil Engineering, Room 478
Phone: +61 2 9351 2116
Fax: +61 2 9351 3343
Email:

Research project - Advanced analysis for locally unstable steel structures

Supervisor: Prof Kim Rasmussen
Associate Supervisor: Dr Hao Zhang

Analysis programs have significantly increased the productivity of Australian Structural engineers over the last 25 years, and led to more efficient, more innovative and more economic designs, notably in the area of steel structures. Structural analysis models for regular and irregular steel frames can now be produced quickly using processing software, and several types of analysis are available in the mainstream software packages.

As the demand for and cost of steel structures increases, there is pressure on the industry to produce increasingly light structures. Accordingly, the overriding trend in the above-mentioned export of advanced technology steels and products is the decreasing thickness of structural sections. The inevitable consequence of this is that the instability of the cross-section is becoming more and more common. The aim of this project is therefore to develop guidelines for the design of thin-walled steel structures by analysis which considers the effect of cross-sectional instability.

It is well known that geometric imperfections have a profound effect on the structural behaviour and strength of thin-walled structures. However, the knowledge gap lies in modelling the geometric imperfections within inelastic large displacement analysis. The project will therefore adopt a statistical approach to derive a rational procedure for implementing geometric imperfections in shell-element-based inelastic large displacement analysis. The innovation will lie in proposing a framework which combines the expansion of the geometric imperfection in eigenmodes with determining the reliability of the structure. Thus, the research shall help pave the way for inelastic large displacement analysis of locally unstable structures to be used as routine design tools in consulting engineering offices, catering for the immediate and long term needs of the industry.

Fig. 1 (a) Local Buckling, (b) Distortional Buckling, (c) Imperfection