The acceptance and the use of cold-formed steel sections has significantly increased in recent years due to advantages such as consistency and accuracy of profile, ease of fabrication, high strength and stiffness to the lightness in the weight. For thin-walled columns, made by folding a plane plate into a section, it is possible that when they are subjected to compression loads they may buckle either locally, if the member is very short, or globally if the member is very long. In addition to local and global buckling, a thin-walled member of an open cross section may also show buckling involving a “distortion” of the cross section. Compared to local and global buckling, distortional buckling is not very familiar and has been discovered only in thin-walled members of open cross sections such as cold-formed steel section columns. The objective of this study is to investigate the behavior of polygonal semi-closed cross-section with pure compression. The study comprise to only elastic buckling and the methodology is consisted by using CUFSM analysis. In order to execute CUFSM of polygonal profiles, the scripts have created which match the Matlab script files (m-files) downloaded from CUFSM 4 open source. The distortional buckling mode is governing as a buckling failure, which occur and dominate in the cases where spring values are 100 kN or higher. However, the contrary result reveals by a decreasing of the spring values. The behavior of the cross-section is dependent on how the interaction of different buckling modes prevails at the corresponding critical half-wavelength. Considering the predomination of distortional buckling mode indicates that the most of polygonal cross-section do not behave as rigid, i.e. as whole cross-section. A reducing of distortional mode and increasing of local mode as well as global mode gives indication that the behavior of the cross-section has changed and turned significantly into more rigid and thus is expected to behave more as whole cross-section.  The more spring values decrease, the higher global mode arises and dominates for the lower slenderness range. The critical half-wavelength for each profile illustrates the needed density between bolts on the longitudinal part of the member. In the interest of eliminating distortional buckling failure, due the fact that distortional buckling is unpredictable, the bolt-density should be lower than the corresponding half-wavelength for the profile where the distortional mode is predominating.

The trend of structural engineering in the recent years is toward the use of lighter and moreeconomical structural elements. In steel construction, peculiarly, thin-walled structural elements arebecoming more popular and have a growing importance. Improved techniques in a manufacturing ofthin-walled elements have led to increased competitiveness of such products in the buildingapplications. Some examples of such structural element can be found in everyday life in form ofcolumns, studs, roofing trusses, and light-weight frames. However, the use of slender profiles and acomplex cross sections shape lead to requirements to study instability phenomenon in a form of local,distortional, flexural, torsional and coupled instability. Such complex structural behavior is inevitablyaccompanied by demand to improve calculation methods and design provisions. In this thesis, aninnovative solution of structural element composed of thin-walled plates is proposed for theapplication on lattice support structure of wind turbine.Thin-walled cold-formed profiles are steel products usually made from cold rolled coils and folded inthe second step. In this way, only open profiles can be produced. The predominant problem of theopen cross-section is the excessive torsional effect caused by the non-coincidence between the shearcenter and mass center, and a poor torsional resistance. A better response is possible with closed crosssections, but such profiles could not be produced by the folding. The solution is to make semi-closedsection by assembling them into polygonal profiles with mechanical fasteners, as presented in thisthesis.Objective of this work is to study the proposed structural sections in design situation and toinvestigate possible design models. The expected structural behavior of the column is a mixturebetween the open and closed cross-section. These cases will be investigated through numerical study.In this thesis presented a comprehensive parametric study on the ultimate strength of proposed coldformedsteel columns using the Finite Element package ABAQUS. FE models were first developedfor columns by using automation that was made through MATLAB and Python script. The bucklingand non-linear FE study was done for the investigation of local (L), distortional (D) and global (G)possible buckling failures and ultimate resistance, respectively. Modelling issues such as boundaryconditions, meshing, initial imperfections, material models, and non-linear solution controls in FEAwere also addressed.The parametric study involved series of profiles of built-up polygonal cross-section types with variedthickness (t), number of corners (n), diameter (d), slenderness (slend), yield strength (fy), number ofpoints along corner radii (np), extension lip length (lext), gusset plate thickness (tg), member length (l),and density of fasteners (s/d ratio), loaded in compression and bending moment. The bending momentoccurs as the effect of forces acting on the connection. The purpose of this analysis is to study thecritical load, cross-sectional behavior, influence of the amplitude of initial imperfections on theultimate load, and influence of each parameter used in the analysis through Full Factorial Design.

A growing recognition of the need for effective marine environmental management as a result of the increasing exploitation of marine biological resources has highlighted the need for high speed ecological seabed mapping. The practice of mapping making extensive use of satellite remote sensing and airborne platforms is well established for terrestrial management. Marine biological resource mapping however is not readily available except in part from that derived for surface waters from satellite based ocean colour mapping. Perhaps the most fundamental reason is that of sampling difficulty, which involves broad areas of seabed coverage, irregularities of seabed surface and depth. Conventional grab sample techniques are widely accepted as a standard seabed mapping methodology that has been in use long before the advent of acoustic techniques and continue to be employed. However. they are both slow and labour intensive, factors which severely limit the spatial coverage available from practical grab sampling programs. While acoustic techniques have been used for some time in pelagic biomass assessment, only recently have acoustic techniques been applied to marine biological resource mapping of benthic communities. Two commercial bottom classifiers available in the market that use normal incidence echosounders are the RoxAnn and QTC View systems. Users and practitioners should be cautious however when using black box implementations of the two commercial systems without a proper quality control over raw acoustic data since some researchers in their studies have indicated problems with these two bottom classifiers such as, among others, a depth dependence. In this thesis, an alternative approach was adopted to the use of echosounder returns for bottom classification. / The approach used in this study is similar to,~ used in the commercial RoxAnn system. In grouping bottom types however, Multivariate analysis (Principal Component Analysis and Cluster Analysis) was adopted instead of the allocation system normally used in the RoxAnn system, called RoxAnn squares. In addition, the adopted approach allowed for quality control over acoustic data before further analysis was undertaken. As a working hypothesis, it was assumed that on average 0 and aE2 = 0 where E1 and E2 are the roughness and hardness indices, respectively, and RO is the depth. For roughness index (E1), this was achieved by introducing a constant angular integration interval to the tail of the first OM returns whereas for hardness index (E2), this was achieved by introducing a constant depth integration interval. Since three different frequencies, i.e. 12, 38 and kHz, were operated, Principal Component Analysis was used here to reduce the dimensionality of roughness and hardness indices, formed from the three operated qu frequencies separately. The k-means technique was applied to the first principal component of roughness index and the first principal comp component of hardness index to produce separable seabed types. This produced four separable seabed types, namely soft-smooth, soft-rough, hard-smooth and hard-rough seabeds. / Principal Component Analysis was also used to reduce the dimensionality of the area backscattering coefficient sA, a relative measure of biomass of benthic mobile biota. The bottom classification results reported here appear to be robust in that, where independent ground truthing was available, acoustic classification was generally congruent with ground truth results. When investigating the relationship between derived bottom type and acoustically assessed total biomass of benthic mobile biota, no trend linking the two parameters, however, appears. Nevertheless, using the hierarchical agglomerative technique applied to a set of variables containing average first principal component of the area backscattering coefficient sA, the average first principal component of roughness and hardness indices, the centroids of first principal component of roughness and hardness indices associated with the four seabed types and species composition of fish group of the common species in trawl stations available, two main groups of quasi acoustic population are observed in the North West Shelf (NWS) study area and three groups are observed in the South East Fisheries (SEF) study area. The two main groups of quasi acoustic population in the NWS study area and the three main groups of quasi acoustic population in the study area are associated with the derived seabed types and fish groups of the common species.