Project R-8475

FAtigue STrength of COLD-formed structural steel details (Research)

Fatigue design rules for cold-formed steel sections and details are completely missing on a European level. EN 1993-1-3, deals only with the static design of cold-formed thin-walled sections. Its commentaries, and related design manuals, do not even mention fatigue design. EN1993-1-9, the relevant part of Eurocode-3 for fatigue design, is not covering design and classification of cold-formed thinwalled details. Cold-formed steel members are increasingly adopted in racking systems installed in logistic warehouses where "storage and retrieval" (S/R) machines run faster and faster, while carrying heavier and heavier loads in a "7 days - 24 hours" economy. For this reason, loading conditions on these type of racks and their auxiliary structures are not anymore quasi-static but dynamic, and cold-formed steel structural details may be subjected to load cycles in the order of 0.5 million/year. Despite many (high-cycle) fatigue failures recently occurred, the total lack of fatigue assessment rules for cold-formed steel structural details at European level represents a relevant problem for the whole European logistic industry, causing losses estimated in the order of 25-30 millions/year. Answering to this industrial need, FASTCOLD aims at generating essential knowledge in the field of fatigue assessment of cold-formed steel structural details, with the intrinsic wider perspective of a "pre-normative" research, as the results will be presented in a way compatible for immediate implementation in Eurocodes. The project aims at developing fatigue design rules of general validity for cold-formed steel structural details and at generating a classification of such details according to their fatigue strength (like those given for thick-walled, hot-rolled steel details in EN 1993-1-9). Specific focus will be given to applications for the logistic industry (which represent a typical case of fatigue prone cold-formed structural steel details).

01 July 2017 - 31 December 2021