Experimental investigation on slip-in connection for cold-formed steel double channel sections

Abstract

The application of cold-formed steel in light steel framing design can become a popular choice of Industrialized Building System, by moving huge amount of construction work to the factory and leaving the construction site cleaner and safer. However the joints behaviour for primary structures, particularly the partial strength semi-rigid beam-to-column connection has not been studied in depth. This paper presents the isolated joint test on slip-in connection using 6 mm hot-rolled steel gusset plate. Two cold-formed lipped channel sections were placed back-to-back to form beam and column members. Three specimens with the depth of beam ranging from 150 mm to 250 mm were tested. From the experimental results, it is observed that the ratio of moment resistance of joint to the moment resistance of the connected beam increases in the range of 0.46 to 0.70. The rotational capacities of the joints exceed 30 mRad. The rotational stiffness achieves 511 kNm/rad to 1671 kNm/rad. It is concluded that the proposed connections could be classified as partial strength connection.