Numerical study of the behavior of stainless steel plate girder loaded in shear with focus on continuous strength method CSM

Abstract

Stainless steel design provisions assume analogy to carbon steels elastic, perfectly plastic behavior which results in conservative predictions of the shear capacity of the former type of steel. The continuous strength method (CSM) takes into account the nonlinearity of stainless steel by using deformation-based design equations. This report discusses the main assumptions of this method and presents its application to flexure and compression design along with a recent attempt to apply it to shear. A numerical study of the behavior of stainless steel plate girders loaded in shear is carried out. A total of 92 sections with different web panel aspect ratio, web height, web thickness and web slenderness were modelled. The geometric imperfection and failure shapes, loaddeformation curves and diagonal distances presented herein are used to derive two new CSM equations for shear. Numerical comparison of the shear capacity obtained from the best fit CSM equation shows that it improves the accuracy and reduces the scatter relative to currently used design methods.