Buckling behaviour of cold-formed channel sections under uniformly distributed loads

This paper presents an investigation on the buckling behaviour of cold-formed steel channel section beams when subjected to a uniformly distributed load. The focus of the study is on the local and distortional buckling, for which existing results are only for sections subjected to pure compression and/or pure bending. The results obtained from this study have shown that, for local buckling, there is no practical difference in the critical loads between pure bending and a uniformly distributed load. For distortional buckling, however, remarkable difference exists. The critical load for a uniformly distributed load is generally higher than that for pure bending by about 10% for beams between 3 and 6 m in length.