The ECBL approach for interactive buckling of thin-walled steel members

Actual buckling curves are always characterised by the erosion of ideal buckling curves. Inrncase of compact sections this erosion is due to the imperfections, while for thin-walled members, arnsupplementary erosion is induced by the phenomenon of coupled instabilities. The ECBL approach-rnErosion of Critical Bifurcation Load - represents a practical and convenient tool to characterise therninstability behaviour of thin-walled members. The present state-of-art paper describes the theoreticalrnbackground of this method and the applications to cold-formed steel sections in compression andrnbending. Special attention is paid to the evaluation methods of erosion coefficient and to their validation.rnThe ECBL approach can be also used to the plastic-elastic interactive buckling of thin-walled members,rnand the paper provides significant results on this line.