SHORT-TERM AND LONG-TERM BEHAVIOR OF AXIALLY LOADED COMPOSITE PROFILED WALLS

Composite profiled walling consists of a formwork of profiled steel sh eeting that acts compositely with an infilled concrete core, These wal ls provide a viable alternative to reinforced concrete or masonry wall s in frame structures, The paper presents a rigorous analysis of compo site profiled walls when subjected to a sustained axial service load, The analysis allows for pin supports that are loaded at a different ec centricity at each end, and treats the short-term and time-dependent b ehaviour of the walls including non-linear material and geometric resp onses, and is shown to agree satisfactorily with test results, The def ormations in the time domain, treated by recourse to the age-adjusted effective modulus method, are substantially greater than the short-ter m deformations, and cannot be ignored in design, A design method is pr esented in the paper based on earlier proposals that may be used to ca lculate the maximum design load of an axially loaded wall, This design method is shown to closely predict the rigorous numerical results.