STABILITY BEHAVIOR AND DESIGN OF LONGITUDINAL SHUTTLE-SHAPED COLUMN

The longitudinal shuttle-shaped columns,as a new type of structural member loaded axially,have been extended into many public buildings recently because of their special and beautiful appearance.Which may be classified into a solid-web section shuttle-shaped column and a build-up section shuttle-shaped column.The latter is called generally as shuttle-shape latticed column formed by longitudinal steel tubes behaving as branches and horizontals steel tubes behaving as batten plates. Instability behavior and design method of both solid-web section shuttleshaped column and shuttle-shape latticed column are presented.The material and geometric nonlinear FE analysis program(ANSYS) is employed to investigate theoretically the influence of the geometric parameters on the buckling behavior and failure mechanism of both columns.These geometric parameters include column length,column slenderness ratio,single branch tube slenderness ratio,the number of diaphragms and thickness of diaphragms tube.By varying these parameters mentioned above the elastic buckling load and corresponding buckling mode of SLC are investigated respectively.And an ultimate strength of SLC is studied and concluded finally.A new and interesting failure mechanism is found from the numerical results obtained and a useful design method for checking overall instability is drawn for practical project design.