Vibration behaviour of axially compressed cold-formed steel members

The objective of this work is to describe the main steps involved in the derivation of a GBT (Generalised Beam Theory) formulation to analyse the vibration behaviour of loaded cold-formed steel members and also to illustrate the application and capabilities of this formulation. In particular, the paper presents and discusses the results of a detailed investigation about the local and global free vibration behaviour of lipped channel simply supported columns. After reporting some relevant earlier GBT-based results dealing with the buckling and vibration behaviours of columns and load-free members, the paper addresses mostly issues concerning the variation of the column fundamental frequency and vibration mode nature/shape with its length and axial compression level. For validation purposes, some GBT-based results are also compared with values obtained by means of 4-node shell finite element analyses performed in the code ABAQUS.