Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present a proposal for the design of steel structures sensitive to buckling to fill the gaps in the current Standard EN 1993-1-1, providing guidelines to obtain the magnitude of the imperfection generalizing the procedure given in clause 5.3.2(11) of EN 1993-1-1 for steel structures sensitive to flexural buckling under compression. According to the standard there are still uncertainties about how to obtain the imperfection when the structures are sensitive to torsional or flexural-torsional buckling due to either compression or bending. In this paper a general procedure to obtain the imperfection is provided and it can be proved that the recommendation given in EN 1993-1-1 is a particular case.