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For compression members with primarily axial forces, steel angles with bolted connections are often used. Due to the eccentric connection on only one leg additional bending moments are acting on the member, leading to a complex load carrying behaviour with flexural and/or lateral torsional buckling phenomena. The paper mainly focuses on the presentation of the influence of realistic end support conditions at the gusset plates on the member capacity in compression. In the first part of the paper, about 300 existing test results for steel angles in compression with bolted connections are prepared in such a way that they can be compared with different design rules. This was achieved through the common representation of all test results as a function of the normalized slenderness λ ¯ v about the weak axis. In the second part, systematic numerical calculations are conducted for limit cases of the stiffness of the boundary condition of the load-introducing gusset plates (rigid/hinged). The results are also presented in dependency of the relative slenderness λ ¯ v . The consolidation of all tests and numerical results shows (besides the well-known difference between one-bolt and two-bolt connections) a very high influence of the end support of the gusset plate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a design proposal for the out-of-plane buckling resistance of prismatic beam-columns subject to axial compression and uniaxial major-axis bending that was developed based on the well-known Ayrton-Perry format. Firstly, the relevant theoretical background is summarized, closely following the theoretical derivation performed by Szalai and Papp (2010). Secondly, the required transformations for the engineering application of the design procedure are detailed and extended to arbitrary bending moment distributions. Appropriate generalized initial imperfection factors for the out-of-plane buckling of beam-columns are defined so as to achieving complete consistency across the stability verifications for columns, beams and beam-columns. The proposed procedure is subsequently validated against a large set of advanced numerical simulations. A good agreement was found between the numerical results and the estimates provided by the proposed design procedure, both in terms of the overall trend and the specific quantitative results. Based on a statistical assessment, the comparison with the interaction expression of Eurocode 3 (2005) (method 2) showed that this proposal slightly outperforms the Eurocode procedure, both in terms of average values and dispersion of results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]