AXIAL BEHAVIOR OF STAINLESS STEEL SQUARE THIN-WALLED TUBES STIFFENED INTERNALLY

Two different schemes called “ties and longitudinal stiffeners” were proposed for improving the performance of stainless steel square thin walled tubes. An analytical study using finite element models loaded axially has been conducted. Both geometric and material nonlinearities were considered. Those models were verified against the results obtained from previous researches. The analytical study compared between unstiffened, ties stiffened and longitudinally stiffened stainless steel square thin walled tubes. The studied parameters were square thin walled tube width-to-thickness ratio (W/t) and the axial spacing of stiffening along the length. It was observed that the axial load strength can be enhanced by proposed ties stiffening schemes.