Thin‐walled open cross‐sections are commonly used in steel storage pallet rack structures. In some cases, open sections are employed as beam members. These beam members usually have weld spots along their length in order to reduce the distortional deformation under a flexural load. On the other hand, beam members are typically connected to columns by means of claws, which typically exhibit a nonlinear moment ‐ rotation relationship. These two characteristic should be taken into account in order to properly reproduce their structural response.
In this paper, the Generalised Beam Theory (GBT) is used to perform a geometrical nonlinear analysis of a pallet rack beam members taking weld spots and the beam‐to‐column connection behavior into account. The influence of the number and location of weld spots, as well as the beam‐to‐column connection behavior, in the distortional deformation of a beam member is evaluated by means of GBT nonlinear analyses. The results show that the use of a small number of weld spots could be enough to minimize the beam distortional deformation. Moreover, the stiffness of the beam‐to‐column connection also has influence on the beam distortional deformation. Finally, GBT results are successfully compared with shell finite element analyses.