The objective of this paper is to develop a yielding surface of thin-walled cold-formed steel members subjected to distortional buckling, and then integrate the surface into pushover analysis of rack structures. Distortional buckling is one of the dominant buckling behaviors of rack members due to their intrinsic section profile. In this study, the Axial-Moment-Moment (PMM) interaction surface for a perforated omega column is established using the finite element method and compared with the theoretical one by EN 15512. It is found that the theoretical PMM domain might be conservative. Then, pushover analyses using these two PMM surfaces along with PMM from ASCE 7 are performed on a cold-formed steel rack. The pushover curve and failure mechanism of the models are analyzed with those from a detailed shell Finite Element model and a full-scale experiment. Finally, this approach of employing distortional PMM is comprehensively assessed from computational cost and reliability for its efficiency in engineering practice.We are grateful to Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province for their financial support (No: BK20191268) to this paper
