Comparative study on cold-formed, hot-formed and hot-finished structural hollow sections

A comparative study on the influence of different manufacturing process on physical, chemical and mechanical properties of cold-formed, hot-formed and cold-formed with subsequent heat treatment steel square structural hollow sections manufactured to Grade S355J2H of BS EN 10219 and BS EN 10210 was carried out. Physical properties were checked against the corresponding production standards. Chemical composition test using optical emission spectrometer was employed to analyze their differences in chemical contents, while tensile test, sectioning test and hole-drilling test were carried out to analyze the difference in mechanical properties such as yield stress, tensile stress, ductility, impact toughness and locked-in residual stress. The study concluded that mechanical properties are greatly affected by their manufacturing process, and hot-finished sections are not the same as hot-formed sections although they shared the same production standard.