Abstract
This paper presents a novel experimental investigation into the pre- and postcritical behavior of steel-plate girders in shear. We have quantitatively scrutinized the deformation behavior of the web shear buckling using an optical measurement system. We reveal that the postcritical phase consists of two distinct stages, which refutes the belief of seemingly conflicting modeling approaches between the North American and the European design codes. We show that the first stage ends with the onset of a temporary instability of the main shear buckling that caps the girder’s shear resistance and corresponds to the shear capacity of the Basler model from the North American design code. We also show that the second stage, however, confirms the modeling approach of the Eurocode, because this stage exhibits (after stabilizing secondary buckling develops) a recovery of the shear resistance and terminates with the onset of a failure mechanism with plastic hinges in the flanges. While restoring the validity of the Basler model, we uncover the need for further experimental and numerical investigations to quantitatively assess the range of applicability of the Eurocode model.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through the Project No. 200021_165561 as well as the Grant No. P2EZP2_175298 awarded to Dr. Neuenschwander as a SNSF Early PostDoc Mobility Fellowship, the generous support of the Structural Laboratory of Prof. Dr. M. Fontana at ETH Zurich and the assistance of the students Matteo Daldini and Adrian Gabbi in performing the experimental study.
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Published In
Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 146 • Issue 11 • November 2020
Copyright
© 2020 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 7, 2019
Accepted: May 27, 2020
Published online: Aug 23, 2020
Published in print: Nov 1, 2020
Discussion open until: Jan 23, 2021
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