ABSTRACT
The manufacturing process of cold-formed steel members induces cold work which has a significant effect on their structural behaviour and strength. In order to assess this cold-work effect, residual stresses and equivalent plastic strains need to be quantified. Laboratory measurements of residual stresses in cold-formed thin-walled sections are difficult and of limited accuracy, and thus accurate analytical solutions for residual stresses in coldformed carbon steel and stainless steel sections were recently proposed by the first author and his co-workers (Quach et al., 2004; 2009a; 2009b), in which the manufacturing process has been closely modelled. However, these analytical solutions for residual stresses in stainless steel sections are complicated and not so user-friendly. This paper presents a simplified residual stress model for press-braked stainless steel sections, which provides an easy way to obtain an accurate prediction of complex residual stress distributions. The accuracy of the simplified model is demonstrated by comparing its predictions with those from a finite element-based simulation. This simplified model can be employed to define the initial state of a cold-formed stainless steel section in a nonlinear finite element analysis of buckling behaviour.