General Method for the fire design of tapered steel columns: Out‐of‐plane flexural buckling

Abstract

The General Method (GM) covers the safety check of structural elements with complex support conditions and/or of non-prismatic members. However, it's not widely validated at normal temperature and is inexistent in fire part of the Standard EN 1993-1-2. With that in mind, this investigation aims at proposing and validating the GM to perform the safety check of unrestrained tapered columns at elevated temperatures. This is done, first, by including, in the original formulation, the reduction of steel material properties with the temperature, and later by improving the EN 1993-1-2 out-of-plane buckling curve. With this novel approach, the GM shows good agreement to numerical results and produces accurate predictions of out-of-plane resistance for tapered columns at elevated temperatures.