Comparative Study on Cold Form Purlins for Distortional Buckling Behaviour

This paper presents the comparative study on cold form purlin sections under distortional buckling behaviour. The “C” purlins are now-a-days widely used in all industrial buildings. It is made up of steel sheets, thickness ranges from 0.8mm to 5mm and formed by cold process. It is extensively used for the advantage of lightweight, low cost and easy manufacturing. In the present study, an analysis has been made to understand the behaviour of cold formed “C” purlins for gravity and wind load conditions. In actual practice compression flanges and tension flanges are laterally restrained by roof sheeting in gravity and wind loading respectively. For this study, actual full scale model test have been conducted in laboratory, for above said boundary conditions. Uniformly distributed load was applied and vertical and lateral deflection was measured. In addition, a numerical study using finite element analysis was done for the above said case. For the analysis ANSYS 10.0 software was used. Finally a comparative study is made between theoretical and experimental results.