Eurocode 9 Cross-Section Classification of Optimised Aluminium Profiles in Compression

Aluminium alloys are widely used due to their advantageous properties, i.e., their lightweight, high corrosion resistance, and high recyclability. A disadvantage of using aluminium alloys is their low elastic modulus which is almost three times less than that of the steel. To use aluminium alloys more often in structural applications, the stiffness of such structural elements (stiffness-toweight ratio) has to be increased. To achieve this, structural topology optimisation (STO) can be employed as it can produce the optimum distribution of the material in the cross-sectional domain. This paper focuses on a recently optimised aluminium section and further improves its manufacturability by creating new profile shapes with a combination of both straight and curved elements. Stub-column tests were conducted through finite element (FE) analyses to determine the behaviour of the optimised aluminium sections under compression and investigate the effectiveness of using existing methods for their classification. It was found that Eurocode 9 can be used for the classification of these novel aluminium profiles.