Shear buckling resistance and intermediate transverse stiffeners internal forces of full-scale steel plate girders - Experimental tests and numerical investigation

This paper presents the results from two full-scale transversally stiffened plate girder's load tests in shear and bending. The plate girder's internal stiffener forces and shear buckling resistance are estimated using the web and stiffener measured strains. These results show that the reported axial compression and bending moment of the intermediate transverse stiffeners for the tested plate girder are 70% of the FprEN 1993-1-5: 2022 [1] design force. The two full-scale plate girders fail due to buckling shear. Nonlinear FEM analyses based on the test girder geometry, measured initial geometric imperfections, and the material properties from the tensile tests, show excellent agreement with the test results, with less than 5% on the maximum applied forces and related displacements. The principal membrane stresses path that triggers the failure of the web plate are investigated based on numerical results and compared with the test measurements. Contrary to the assumption of a rotated stress field model, the principal compression stress obtained in the experimental test was higher than shear buckling stress in the vicinity of the intermediate transverse stiffener.