Substantial research has been conducted in the last years into the structural responses of cold-formed and hot-rolled stainless steel equal-leg angle columns, whereas there is no experimental data on laser-welded stainless steel angle columns despite these sections being increasingly used in the modern construction industry. To fill this gap and provide benchmarks for design, a comprehensive experimental investigation into the structural strength and stability of laser-welded austenitic stainless steel equal-leg angle columns under pure axial compression was performed and described in this paper. A series of laboratory tests, performing on two test groups of specimens with nominal dimensions of 60 $\times 60\times$ 6 mm and 100 $\times 100\times$ 10 mm and different lengths, involved 6 stub column tests and 20 global buckling tests together with measurements on material properties, initial geometric imperfections and residual stresses. The experimental observations reveal that the column ultimate capacity and prevalent failure mode – major-axis flexural–torsional buckling and minor-axis flexural buckling – are highly dependent on the column slenderness and initial imperfections. The full load-lateral displacement, load-torsional rotation and load-axial strain responses of the specimens were fully reported and discussed. The results were employed to evaluate the accuracy of the current European and North American stainless steel design standards. The evaluation results revealed that the codified design procedures yield conservative resistance predictions of laser-welded stainless steel equal-leg angle columns, showing a prospective for their modification and improvement by providing more optimized and realistic results in design considering the actual residual stress distributions, material nonlinearity and strain hardening.

近年来，已经对冷弯和热轧不锈钢等边角柱的结构响应进行了大量研究，尽管在这些领域中越来越多地使用激光焊接不锈钢角柱，但尚无实验数据。现代建筑业。为了填补这一空白并为设计提供基准，本文对纯激光压缩下的奥氏体不锈钢等肢角钢立柱的结构强度和稳定性进行了全面的实验研究，并在本文中进行了描述。一系列实验室测试，对标称尺寸为60的两个样本测试组执行$\times 60\times$ 6毫米和100 $\times 100\times$10 mm和不同的长度，包括6个短柱测试和20个整体屈曲测试，以及对材料性能，初始几何缺陷和残余应力的测量。实验观察表明，柱的极限容量和普遍的破坏模式-长轴挠曲-扭转屈曲和短轴挠曲屈曲-高度取决于柱子的细长度和初始缺陷。充分报道和讨论了样品的全载荷-横向位移，载荷-扭转旋转和载荷-轴向应变响应。结果被用来评估当前欧洲和北美不锈钢设计标准的准确性。