Thin-walled cold-formed steel members are used worldwide in industrial systems for the storage of goods and
materials, such as drive-in, drive-through and selective pallet racks. A relevant difference with respect to the
more traditional civil and industrial steel structures consists in the extensive use of thin-walled cold-formed
members having non-bisymmetric cross-sections. This choice allows for the best possible structural performance
whileminimizingweight, and hence, achieving a very lowcost of the skeleton frames. The design is influenced by
the typical problems associated with the use of slender cross-section members and by thewarping effects. Therefore,
design of these industrial structures appears quite complex, because in engineering offices the most commonly
used finite element (FE) software analysis packages offer beam formulations that are only capable of
modeling the behavior of members having two axes of symmetry.
The paper deals with the design of beams used in industrial storage systems. Refined parametric analyses have
been carried out by means of an open source FE software package able to simulate the behavior of nonsymmetric
cross-section members. With reference to lipped channel and zed beams, the contribution ofwarping
effects has been investigatedwith regard to not only the in-service displacements and rotations, but also focusing
on its influence in the distribution of stresses at the ultimate limit state. Furthermore, in order to investigate the
differences associated with the use of 6DOF and 7DOF FE beam formulations, Appendix A proposes two design
examples, which are also reproduced in Appendix B by hand calculations