TABLE 4.

6 Color Code for Aluminum

Specification Alloys
Alloy Color
1100 White
2014 Gray
2024 Red
3003 Green
3004 �
3005 �
3105 �
5005 �
5050 �
5052 Purple
5083 Red and Gray
5086 Red and Orange
5154 Blue and Green
5454 �
5456 Gray and Purple
6005 �
6061 Blue
6063 Yellow and Green
6066 Red and Green
6070 Blue and Gray
6105 �
6351 Purple and Orange
7075 Black
Certificate of Inspection and Test Results: Gives minimum and maximum
mechanical properties obtained from testing each lot and lists the applicable
chemical-composition limits (not the actual chemical-composition).
Certificate of Inspection and Test Results including Chemical Analysis:
Gives minimum and maximum mechanical properties and chemical analysis
obtained from testing each lot.
These certificates are listed in ascending order of cost. For most routine
structural applications, a certificate of compliance or inspection is usually
sufficient.
5 Explanation of the
Aluminum Specification
This chapter could also have been titled ��Structural Design with Metals��
because it covers a range of metal behavior beyond that covered by the metal
specification we all learned in school (the AISC Specification [38, 39]). In a
number of ways, hot-rolled steel design is just a special case of metal design,
while the Aluminum Specification offers a more panoramic view. Ironically,
learning about aluminum can actually give you better insight into steel design;
in college, most of us studiously avoided any metal but hot-rolled steel.
Design with hot-rolled steel is typically limited to the so-called ��compact
sections.�� These shapes have sufficiently stocky cross-sectional elements so
local buckling is not a concern. In the real world, many metal structures are
made of lighter gauge components instead, whose capacities may be influenced
by local buckling. We�ll lead you into the land of postbuckling strength,
where no compact section has ever gone. If you master this concept, you�ll
not only be able to deal with the wide range of shapes available in aluminum,
you will also gain some insight into the design of light-gauge steel structures.
While the Aluminum Specification addresses the full spectrum of element
slenderness, in steel you have to leave the comfort of the Steel Manual and
wade into the complex provisions of the AISI cold-formed steel specification
(40) to design members that have very slender elements. Although the Aluminum
Specification and the cold-formed steel specification use entirely different
methods to address slender elements, they both deal with the same
fundamental behavior.
We�ll discuss the Aluminum Specification�s approach to metal design in
this chapter, giving examples and highlighting sections of the Specification
as we cover them. For the plug-and-chug oriented, you can skip to Chapter
7, where we�ll keep the discussion to a minimum and provide the step-bystep
procedures for applying the Aluminum Specification. Finally, for a
checklist of the applicable provisions of the Specification for each mode of
behavior, refer to Appendix G.
5.1 TENSION MEMBERS
If you�re like most engineers, you appreciate the simplicity of tensile stresses.
After all, tensile stresses and strengths are so much easier to calculate than