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Tianjin Brisk Steel is one of the manufacturers of Building Structural Hollow Section in China. Our products are mainly exported to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe, New Zealand, and other regions.If you would like to learn more about our products, feel free to contact us and send your purchase list.
Reading a Hollow Section Specification Correctly
A drawing note that just says "HSS column" is incomplete information for a buyer. A workable purchasing specification needs four things locked down:
- The governing product standard - this fixes the chemistry, mechanical property minimums, and testing regime the tube was actually produced and certified against. North American work typically points to ASTM A500; European work typically points to EN 10210 (hot-finished) or EN 10219 (cold-formed); other regions have their own equivalents such as GB/T 6728 in China or AS/NZS 1163 in Australia and New Zealand.
- The grade within that standard - because a single standard usually covers a family of strength and toughness levels, and substituting one grade for another changes the actual load the member can carry.
- The nominal outside dimensions and wall thickness - straightforward, but worth double-checking against the specific size range a mill or distributor actually stocks versus what requires a special production run.
- The finish - bare mill finish, primed, painted, or galvanized, since this affects both what shows up on a delivery truck and how the material needs to be handled once it's on site.
Miss any one of these four and "equivalent" material sourced against an incomplete spec can quietly fail to match what the structural calculations assumed.
Choosing Between SHS, RHS, and CHS Profiles
Take square hollow section (SHS) first. Its four identical flat faces give fabricators a flush surface to land gusset plates, base plates, and perpendicular framing without notching or coping, which is a big part of why it dominates as a column choice in low-rise work and shows up so often as truss chord material where the member needs equal bending resistance regardless of direction.
Rectangular hollow section (RHS), by contrast, is really about giving the designer a knob to turn. Because the two axes have different section moduli, an engineer can rotate the member so its stiff axis lines up with wherever the load actually wants to go - that's precisely why RHS shows up so consistently as floor beam and roof purlin material, where bending is overwhelmingly one-directional to begin with.
Then there's circular hollow section (CHS). Round geometry spreads material as efficiently as possible around the axis for members under axial load or twist, and it happens to look the cleanest doing it - which is why you'll see CHS specified for exposed columns, handrails, and any structure where wind- or seismic-induced torsion drives the governing design case.
Where the Standards Actually Diverge
It's tempting to treat "structural hollow section" as one global product, but the standards behind it were written independently and don't line up perfectly.
ASTM A500 (the standard most North American structural drawings reference) sets its property requirements around a Grade B/Grade C strength split, with Grade B - 46,000 psi minimum yield for shaped sections - covering the bulk of ordinary building work and Grade C reserved for projects that need the extra margin.
EN 10219 and EN 10210, the cold-formed and hot-finished European counterparts, organize strength around the S235/S275/S355 grade family instead, with an added toughness suffix (JR, J0, J2, and so on) that tells a buyer exactly what impact energy the steel is guaranteed to hold at a given test temperature - a level of detail the ASTM system doesn't express the same way.
None of this means one system is "better" - it means a buyer sourcing internationally, or comparing quotes from suppliers working to different standards, needs to compare actual mechanical property numbers rather than assuming grade names translate directly across borders.
Typical Applications in Building Construction
Zinc protects steel two ways: it acts as a physical barrier, and - more importantly - it acts as a sacrificial anode, corroding preferentially to protect any small areas of exposed steel (at a cut edge or minor coating damage, for example) through galvanic action. Service life depends heavily on the atmospheric exposure category:
- Rural/light industrial atmospheres: coatings commonly last several decades before first maintenance is needed
- Suburban/moderate industrial: somewhat shorter, but still typically multi-decade service life
- Marine/coastal or heavy industrial atmospheres: corrosion rates on zinc are faster, so expect a shorter, though still substantial, service interval before touch-up or recoating is warranted
The American Galvanizers Association and comparable international bodies publish zinc corrosion rate data by exposure zone if you need to model expected service life for a specific project location.
FAQ
Q: What's the difference between structural hollow section and standard mechanical or pipe-grade tube?
A: Structural hollow section is manufactured and certified to a structural design standard (such as ASTM A500 or EN 10219) with guaranteed minimum yield and tensile strength suitable for load-bearing design, along with tighter dimensional and testing controls. Mechanical or pipe-grade tube may look identical but typically isn't certified to structural mechanical property requirements and shouldn't be substituted into a structural application without verifying its actual specification.
Q: Is square, rectangular, or round hollow section stronger for a building column?
A: "Stronger" depends on the failure mode being checked - round and square sections have equal radius of gyration in all directions, which is efficient for columns without a clearly dominant load direction, while rectangular sections can be more efficient where the load is primarily one-directional and can be oriented toward the section's strong axis. The right choice comes from the specific structural calculation, not a general rule of thumb.
Q: Can structural hollow section be filled with concrete for extra capacity?
A: Yes - concrete-filled hollow section columns are a well-established composite construction method, where the steel tube confines the concrete core (increasing its effective compressive strength) while the concrete restrains the tube wall against local buckling. This is commonly used where higher axial capacity or improved fire resistance is needed within a limited column footprint.
Q: Does structural hollow section need to be galvanized for building construction?
A: Only where the application requires it - interior, climate-controlled structural steel is commonly left with a mill or shop-primed finish, while exterior, below-grade, or high-humidity applications typically call for hot dip galvanizing or an equivalent coating system. This should be specified based on the project's exposure conditions, not assumed by default in either direction.
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