The importance of fire safety design has been realised due to the ever increasing loss of properties and lives caused by structural failures during fires. In recognition of the importance of fire safety design, extensive research has been undertaken in the field of fire safety of buildings and structures especially over the last couple of decades. In the same period, the development of fire safety engineering principles has brought significant reduction to the cost of fire protection. However the past fire research on steel structures has been limited to heavier, hot-rolled structural steel members and thus the structural behaviour of light gauge cold-formed steel members under fire conditions is not well understood. Since cold-formed steel structures have been commonly used for numerous applications and their use has increased rapidly in the last decade, the fire safety of cold-formed steel structural members has become an important issue. The current design standards for steel structures have simply included a list of reduction factors for the yield strength and elasticity modulus of hot-rolled steels without any detailed design procedures. It is not known whether these reduction factors are applicable to the commonly used thin, high strength steels in Australia. Further, the local buckling effects dominate the structural behaviour of light gauge cold-formed steel members. Therefore an extensive research program was undertaken at the Queensland University of Technology to investigate the local buckling behaviour of light gauge cold-formed steel compression members under simulated fire conditions. The first phase of this research program included 189 tensile coupon tests including three steel grades and six thicknesses to obtain the accurate yield strength and elasticity modulus values at elevated temperatures because the deterioration of the mechanical properties is the major parameter in the structural design under fire conditions. The results obtained from the tensile tests were used to predict the ultimate strength of cold-formed steel members. An appropriate stress-strain model was also developed by considering the inelastic mechanical characteristics. The second phase of this research was based on a series of more than 120 laboratory experiments and corresponding numerical analyses on cold-formed steel compression members to investigate the local bucking behaviour of the unstiffened flange elements, stiffened web elements and stiffened web and flange elements at elevated temperatures up to 800°C. The conventional effective design rules were first simply modified considering the reduced mechanical properties obtained from the tensile coupon tests and their adequacy was studied using the experimental and numerical results. It was found that the simply modified effective width design rules were adequate for low strength steel members and yet was not adequate for high strength cold-formed steel members due to the severe reduction of the ultimate strength in the post buckling strength range and the severe reduction ratio of the elasticity modulus to the yield strength at elevated temperatures. Due to the inadequacy of the current design rules, the theoretical, semi-empirical and empirical effective width design rules were developed to accurately predict the ultimate strength of cold-formed steel compression members subject to local buckling effects at elevated temperatures. The accuracy of these new design methods was verified by comparing their predictions with a variety of experimental and numerical results. This thesis presents the details of extensive experimental and numerical studies undertaken in this research program and the results including comparison with simply modified effective width design rules. It also describes the advanced finite element models of cold-formed steel compression members developed in this research including the appropriate mechanical properties, initial imperfections, residual stresses and other significant factors. Finally, it presents the details of the new design methods proposed for the cold-formed steel compression members subject to local buckling effects at elevated temperatures.

The desire for energy and resource savings brings magnesium alloys as lightweight materials with high specific strength more and more into the focus. Most structural components are subjected to cyclic loading. In the course of computer aided product development, a numerical prediction of the fatigue life under these conditions must be provided. For this reason, the mechanical properties of the considered material must be examined in detail. Wrought magnesium semifinished products, e.g. magnesium sheet metals, typically reveal strong basal textures and thus, the mechanical behavior considerably differs from that of the well-established magnesium die castings. Magnesium sheet metals reveal a distinct difference in the tensile and compressive yield stress, leading to non-symmetric sigmoidal hysteresis loops within the elasto-plastic load range. These unusual hysteresis shapes are caused by cyclic twinning and detwinning. Furthermore, wrought magnesium alloys reveal pseudoelastic behavior, leading to nonlinear unloading curves. Another interesting effect is the formation of local twin bands during compressive loading. Nevertheless, only little information can be found on the numerical fatigue analysis of wrought magnesium alloys up to now. The aim of this thesis is the investigation of the mechanical properties of wrought magnesium alloys and the development of an appropriate fatigue model. For this purpose, twin roll cast AM50 as well as AZ31B sheet metals and extruded ME21 sheet metals were used. Mechanical tests were carried out to present a comprehensive overview of the quasi-static and cyclic material behavior. The microstructure was captured on sheet metals before and after loading to evaluate the correlation between the microstructure, the texture, and the mechanical properties. Stress- and strain-controlled loading ratios and strain-controlled experiments with variable amplitudes were performed. Tests were carried out along and transverse to the manufacturing direction to consider the influence of the anisotropy. Special focus was given to sigmoidal hysteresis loops and their influence on the fatigue life. A detailed numerical description of hysteresis loops is necessary for numerical fatigue analyses. For this, a one-dimensional phenomenological model was developed for elasto-plastic strain-controlled constant and variable amplitude loading. This model consists of a three-component equation, which considers elastic, plastic, and pseudoelastic strain components. Considering different magnesium alloys, good correlation is reached between numerically and experimentally determined hysteresis loops by means of different constant and variable amplitude load-time functions. For a numerical fatigue life analysis, an energy based fatigue parameter has been developed. It is denoted by “combined strain energy density per cycle” and consists of a summation of the plastic strain energy density per cycle and the 25 % weighted tensile elastic strain energy density per cycle. The weighting represents the material specific mean stress sensitivity. Applying the energy based fatigue parameter on modeled hysteresis loops, the fatigue life is predicted adequately for constant and variable amplitude loading including mean strain and mean stress effects. The combined strain energy density per cycle achieves significantly better results in comparison to conventional fatigue models such as the Smith-Watson-Topper model. The developed phenomenological model in combination with the combined strain energy density per cycle is able to carry out numerical fatigue life analyses on magnesium sheet metals.