The Effectiveness for Installations and Strengths of the Application of Cold-Formed Steel SupaCee Sections

Cold-formed steel structures have been progressively used in structural buildings with the application of typical channel sections. The cold-formed channel sections are prone to be instable due to the small thickness and large web, and this leads to the occurrence of the buckling phenomenon at the early stage wasting the material expenditure. Therefore, stiffeners have been added to the web of this section to increase the sectional stability to create a section termed SupaCee. The paper will investigate the capacities of such steel channel and SupaCee members due to compression or bending by using the direct strength method. The obtained results are the basis to estimate the capacity improvements of SupaCee members compared to those of channel ones. Installation effectiveness of the innovative SupaCee sections is also analysed on the basis of technical reports from the manufacturers.