Cross-Sectional Capacity of Wire Arc Additively Manufactured Stainless Steel Channel Section Stub Columns

Additive manufacturing, often known as three-dimensional (3D) printing, is being used increasingly in the construction sector. This paper reports an experimental investigation of the cross-sectional behavior and compressive resistances of additively manufactured stainless steel channel section stub columns. The experimental program included material tests, measurements of geometric properties, and stub column tests, in which both nonslender and slender channel sections were 3D-printed using wire arc additive manufacturing and were compressed concentrically for testing. Following the laboratory tests, an in-depth design analysis was undertaken based on the test data. In the design analysis, the applicability of the European, US, and Chinese standards and the continuous strength method to additively manufactured stainless steel channel sections was evaluated; the continuous strength method is the only method that accounts for the effects of material strain hardening in the capacity prediction. The results from the design analysis indicate that all the existing international standards offer satisfactory design accuracy for wire arc additively manufactured stainless steel stub columns with slender channel sections, but yield rather conservative compressive capacity predictions for their nonslender counterparts. It was found that the continuous strength method offers improved overall design accuracy over the international standards examined, due to the rational consideration of strain hardening.