Light weight material usually be chosen as a material for earthquake resistant building in order to reduce inertia
force of the building. In comparison with others section, a cold-formed steel section is a lighter section and makes this section is categorized as a light weight material. During reconstruction of Yogyakarta earthquake of 27 May 2006 some housings were constructed by using cold-formed steel sections. However, investigation on the
utility of cold-formed steel section for structural elements was very limited. Two experimental programs of coldformed steel-concrete beams were carried out.
One of the experiment used normal weight concrete and the
other used light weight concrete. In the experimental programs, the normal weight concrete had the compressive
strength of 23.53MPa, while the light weight concrete had
the compressive strength of 12.91MPa. This paper tried to
analyze and compare those experimental programs. The comparison showed that the cold-formed steel beam with normal weight concrete gave higher load capacity than the cold-formed steel beam with light weight concrete.
However, if the comparison was taken with respect to the ratio of compressive strength to density, the cold-formed steel beam with light weight concrete might give more promising bending elements for earthquake resistant building.