Cold-formed steel (CFS) racking systems are widely used for storing products in warehouses. However, as commonly used structures in storage systems, thin-walled open sections are subjected to stability loss because of various buckling modes, including flexural, local, torsional and distortional. This research proposes a novel technique to increase the ultimate capacity of uprights, utilising bolts and spacers, under flexural and compressive loads. The proposed components are attached externally to the sections in certain pitches along the length. In this regard, axial tests were performed on 72 upright frames and nine single uprights with various lengths and thicknesses. Also, the impact of using reinforcing elements was evaluated by investigating the failure modes and ultimate load results. It was concluded that the reinforcement technique is able to restrain upright flanges and therefore improve the upright profiles' strength. For testing the flexural behaviour, 18 samples of three types were made, including non-reinforced sections and two types of sections reinforced along the upright length at different pitches. After that, monotonic loading was applied along both the minor and major axes of the samples. The suggested reinforcing method leads to increasing the flexural capacity of the upright sections about both the major and minor axes. Also, by using reinforcing system, the flexural performance was improved, and buckling and deformation were constrained. In addition, the reinforcement technique was evaluated by Finite Element (FE) method. Moreover, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) algorithms were deployed to predict the normalised ultimate load and deflection of the profiles. Following the empirical tests, the axial and flexural performance of different CFS upright profiles with various lengths, thicknesses and reinforcement spacings were simulated and examined. It was shown that the reinforcing technique improved the capacity of the samples. Consequently, the proposed reinforcements could be considered a highly effective and low-cost technique to strengthen the axial and flexural behaviour of open CFS sections considering a trade-off between performance and cost of utilising the approach
