Bending resistance of stainless steel cross-sections using continuous strength method

Stainless steel exhibits pronounced nonlinearity in stress-strain response when compared to the typical elastic, perfectly-plastic material model adopted for ordinary carbon steel. Currently available design codes on stainless steel do not appropriately take account of the absence of any well defined yield point; the proposed formulations heavily rely on analogies with carbon steel. Bilinear approximation of the material response makes the predictions for cross-section resistances highly conservative, especially when it comes to bending. Continuous Strength method (CSM) is a recently proposed strain based design technique, originally proposed for stainless steel and later extended to other nonlinear metallic materials such as aluminium and high strength steel, makes appropriate account of material nonlinearity using CSM n predicting bending resistance of stainless steel cross-sections. Finite element models have been developed to generate additional results for circular h0llow cross-sections (CHS). Available test results and the results obtained from the developed FE models are used to propose a simplified approach to accurately predict of the bending resistance of stainless steel cross-sections.