Behaviour of rectangular gusset plate with angle cleat connections for cold-formed steel section

Abstract

Cold-formed steel (CFS) members designed with proper stiffener can significantly increase the loading capacity of the connected member even though they are thin and slender. Design recommendations of connections especially for CFS sections are mostly related to the load-carrying capacities of individual fasteners such as bolts, screws, and rivets. The proposed bolted top-seat flange cleat joint in this paper should be able to categorize as semi-rigid that can further enhance the use of CFS in structural steel. This paper aims to investigate the behaviour of cold-formed steel section with gusset plate integrated with angle cleats. The full-scale isolated joint test was conducted on three specimens where the size of column size is C30024, and the size of beams is C20024, C25024, and C30024. All sections are 2.4mm thick. The connections were stiffened with a rectangular gusset plate of 10mm thick and angle cleat of 6 mm thick, respectively. The result of the test showed that the moment resistance (Mj) of the connection for beam sections C20024, C25024 and C30024 were 45.3 kNm, 48,8 kNm, and 52.5 kNm respectively. The initial stiffness (Sj,ini) of the connections for beam section C20024, C25024 and C30024 were 510 kNm/rad, 650 kNm/rad and 610 kNm/rad respectively. The experimental results showed that the ratio of the moment resistance ranged from 1.00 to 1.16, and the ratio of initial stiffness ranged 1.00 to 1.35 as compared to the numerical analysis adopted from EC3 code.