Experimental buckling behaviour of web tapered I-section steel columns

In this paper, firstly, a global overview of the experimental tests is presented, which covers the test layout, member dimensions and the supplementary tests, essentially characterization of material properties, geometrical dimensions and imperfections, and residual stresses. The key results from each experiment are presented and discussed, they are further compared with numerical and analytical estimations of the member resistance. Finally, the experimental results provide physical validation of the design method proposed in Marques et al. (2012) for web-tapered columns.