A Reappraisal of the Reliability of Local Buckling Rules Based on the Winter Curve

This paper contains a critical reappraisal of the reliability of local buckling rules based on the traditional "Winter curve". It makes use of a data pool of recently published and own "stub column"-type buckling tests, conducted on welded, square box sections, and uses the reliability design philosophy and evaluation methods of the Eurocode - EN 1990 as reference. The evaluation results show that the current European practice is potentially quite unconservative for the basic case studied in this paper; this practice makes use of the Winter curve in conjunction with the effective width method for buckling design, and at the same time neglects any partial safety factor - meaning that the corresponding safety factor yM, by which nominal strength values are divided, is set to 1.0. The paper gives an overview of the available pool of test data, discusses the background of this evaluation result in detail and describes possible amendments to the code.

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