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Steel foams are still a relatively new material, and have yet to find broad application in the field of structural engineering, a major user of structural steel. The authors present an example application of a hypothetical steel foam made of base metal similar to common structural steels and find that a thin plate loaded in-plane and simply supported along all four edges has a higher buckling load when made of a steel foam with relative density less than one. The buckling strength of the plate is inversely proportional to the steel foam relative density when the weight per unit length of the plate is held constant. Lipped C-channels are a more complicated structural member that are commonly made with very thin walls and are used in a variety of structural framing applications. By virtue of their thin walls the strength of such channels is often controlled by elastic instability in one of three modes, local, distortional, and global. The local buckling strength is inversely proportional to the relative density and the global buckling strength is directly proportional to the relative density so that a channel will have higher local and lower global buckling loads than a solid steel channel of equal weight per unit length. Numerical calculations show that for a design unbraced length of 305 mm decreasing the relative density of the steel foam channel increases the buckling capacity until the relative density reaches approximately 0.23, at which point the global mode becomes dominant and the buckling strength begins to decrease. A full treatment of the potential utility of steel foam thin-walled structural sections also requires consideration of member yield loads and stiffness, yet the results presented here give a strong indication that steel foam members are less susceptible to catastrophic buckling failure than equivalent solid steel sections.