ColdSteel/4600
General Specifications
Coinciding with the publication of the third edition of Professor Gregory Hancock’s book Design of Cold-Formed Steel Structures, his colleague Dr Murray Clarke has released the computer software ColdSteel/4600 which brings cold-formed steel design to AS/NZS 4600:1996 within the practical reach of all structural engineers. The software has been developed within the Centre for Advanced Structural Engineering over a number of years and has been rigorously tested against the design examples in Professor Hancock’s book and a range of other problems.
The program runs in a standalone interactive mode under the Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP operating systems. ColdSteel/4600 is intended to be used as a cold-formed steel design “calculator” that facilitates the semi-automated design of cold-formed steel structural members by freeing the engineer from the complex detail of effective section, distortional buckling stress and other detailed design computations.
ColdSteel/4600 performs all the relevant member strength calculations for a range of commonly used cold-formed profile shapes including angle sections, channel sections, Z-sections, hat sections, rectangular hollow sections, and circular hollow sections as shown in Fig. 1. An example problem which can be investigated using ColdSteel/4600 is shown in Fig. 2, with the corresponding main form with all relevant data shown in Fig. 3. The program can then run in either a “check” or “design” mode as depicted in Figs. 4 and 5, respectively.
ColdSteel/4600 has extensive reporting and graphical visualisation facilities. For any particular check or design, the program provides a complete list of all cross-sectional properties for both the full and effective sections, all nominal and design member capacities, the “load factor” against limit states failure for all relevant strength limit states, and other miscellaneous parameters such as elastic column buckling stresses, elastic beam lateral buckling moments, and distortional buckling stresses. The graphical capabilities of ColdSteel/4600 enable the visualisation of the effective sections in compression and bending as shown in Figs 6 and 7, respectively.
There is no other software on the market which is comparable to ColdSteel/4600. If you are in the business of cold-formed steel design, ColdSteel/4600 will quickly become an indispensable design tool.
Detailed Specifications
Download the detailed specifications of ColdSteel as a PDF file.
Typical Screenshot
Download a Demonstration Copy or the User Manual
Technical & Sales Enquiries
Technical Enquiries
Dr Murray Clarke
Phone: 0407 891 451
Email: murray_clarke@hotmail.com
Sales Enquiries and Ordering
Dr John Papangelis
Phone: 61 2 9351 3837
Fax: 61 2 9351 3343
Email: jpp@civil.usyd.edu.au