Residual Stress of 460 MPa High Strength Steel Welded I Section: Experimental Investigation and Modeling

A reliable estimation of residual stress within steel sections is important in steel structural design and construction, especially for high strength steel which has been increasingly used in recent years. An experimental investigation was conducted in this paper to quantify the residual stresses in 460 MPa steel welded I sections using sectioning method. The magnitude and distribution of both compressive and tensile residual stresses were obtained based on 1972 sets of original data measured from eight different sections. The effects of width-thickness ratios of the flange and web, steel plate thickness, weld type and interaction of the flange and web were investigated. It was found that the compressive residual stress magnitude was largely related to the sectional dimension, while no direct correlation was found with the weld type and size for tensile ones. No residual stress interaction between the flange and web was identified because of the stress equilibrium within each individual part. In addition, a distribution model was proposed in this paper and well described the experimental results, which can be used to investigate and design the buckling behavior of 460 MPa high strength steel members.