The Design Guidelines for innovative buckling design rules for structural hollow sections represent the deliverable D9.1 of the RFCS-funded research project HOLLOSSTAB (RFCS Grant Agreement Nr. 2015-709892), which was conducted at the authors’ research institutes and organizations between July 2016 and June 2019. The project led to the development of new design rules for the verification of the cross-sectional and member stability and strength of hollow sections of various shapes and steel grades. The new design rules are applications of the Generalised Slenderness-based Resistance Method (GSRM), which was formulated during the HOLLOSSTAB project as an extension and improvement of existing concepts for the stability design of steel sections and members.

These Design Guidelines contain an overview of the research work carried out during the project, give a concise summary of the developed GSRM design rules for the design of hollow sections, and provide an extensive set of worked examples, which serve to facilitate the understanding of the GSRM design methods and of their practical implementation. The intended readership of these Design Guidelines thus includes researchers aiming to obtain an overview of the HOLLOSSTAB project through a more compact document than the full scientific project reports, as well as practitioners desiring to apply in practice the new GSRM design rules.

The guidelines (under review of RFCS) are available here: Hollosstab Design Guidelines