Experimental and numerical studies on shear behaviour of stainless steel plate girders with inclined stiffeners

Abstract

Experimental and numerical studies on shear buckling behaviour of stainless steel plate girders with inclined stiffeners have been carried out in this study. Material properties of the two adopted stainless steel alloys, including austenitic grade EN 1.4301 and duplex grade EN 1.4462 were obtained, and initial geometric imperfections of the cross-sections were determined. Two stainless steel plate girders with inclined stiffeners were tested un-der simply supported conditions. The critical buckling strengths and ultimate shear re-sistances were all obtained and further compared to those of previously tested plate girders with transverse stiffeners only and both transverse and diagonal stiffeners. Elaborated fi-nite element (FE) models developed by means of the FE software package ABAQUS were validated against the obtained experimental results. The validated FE models was subse-quently used to evaluate the influence of the stiffener inclination on the load-carrying ca-pacity of plate girders.