Structural steel material properties, the AISC 360 LRFD design philosophy, beam design under flexure, deflection, and lateral-torsional buckling, column design under slenderness-governed compression, and bolted and welded connection design.
Structural steel's near-identical behavior in tension and compression and its sharply-defined yield point make it the highest strength-to-weight material in common structural use, but real steel design is governed almost entirely by instability limit states — lateral-torsional buckling in beams, slenderness-governed buckling in columns — rather than by material yielding alone. This module works through AISC 360's limit-state-by-limit-state design philosophy: how φ factors are calibrated by failure ductility, why the same beam section can lose more than half its usable capacity purely from wider brace spacing, and how bolted and welded connections are each checked against their own governing failure modes.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why a steel column's capacity is governed by slenderness (KL/r) rather than by cross-sectional area alone, and why block shear at a bolted connection is easy to overlook because it doesn't correspond to a single, simple stress check. Module 5's ACI 318 concrete content covers this same LRFD limit-state logic from the reinforced concrete side.