The objective of this paper is to examine the stability and strength of concentrically loaded cold-formed steel angles as determined by (i) numerical methods, (ii) experiment, (iii) effective width and (iv) Direct Strength based design methods, in which angles are not pre-qualified sections. The elastic stability of cold-formed steel angle columns is examined primarily with the finite strip method to show that the coincident local-plate/global-torsion mode has some important behavior when multiple buckling half-wavelengths are considered along the length. A series of tests on single and double angles are detailed and the results used to examine existing design methods. The results indicate that the design practice of ignoring local/torsion buckling as a global mode and only considering it as a local mode may not be conservative in some circumstances.
Cold-formed steel angle; buckling
