Cross-sectional analysis of arbitrary sections allowing for residual stresses

The method of cross-section analysis for different sections in a structural frame has been widely investigated since the 1960s for determination of sectional capacities of beam-columns. Many handcalculated equations and design graphs were proposed for the specific shape and type of sections in precomputer age decades ago. In design of many practical sections, these equations may be uneconomical and inapplicable for sections with irregular shapes, leading to the high construction cost or inadequate safety. This paper not only proposes a versatile numerical procedure for sectional analysis of beam-columns, but also suggests a method to account for residual stress and geometric imperfections separately and the approach is applied to design of high strength steels requiring axial force-moment interaction for advanced analysis or direct analysis. A cross-section analysis technique that provides interaction curves of arbitrary welded sections with consideration of the effects of residual stress by meshing the entire section into small triangular fibers is formulated. In this study, two doubly symmetric sections (box-section and H-section) fabricated by high-strength steel is utilized to validate the accuracy and efficiency of the proposed method against a hand-calculation procedure. The effects of residual stress are mostly not considered explicitly in previous works and they are considered in an explicit manner in this paper which further discusses the basis of the yield surface theory for design of structures made of high strength steels.