Beitrag zur Geschichte plastischer Berechnungsmethoden im Stahlbau

Contribution to the history of plastic analysis methods in steel construction. Jacques Heyman (Fig. 1b) has been one of the main contributors to the development of structural theory in the 20th century. After graduating he joined the famous Cambridge Team directed by John Fleetwood Baker (1901–1985) (Fig. 1a) that established the basis for plastic analysis of steel frame structures. Baker had worked for the Steel Structures Research Committee (SSRC) between 1928 and 1936, with the specific task of writing a rational code for elastic analysis of frames. For the first time real structures were tested. The results were surprising; elastic analysis was not suitable for predicting the actual state of the steel structure, contradicting what was believed at the time. This insight caused Baker to change the direction of his research. In 1936 Baker traveled to Germany to attend the IABSE Conference, where he met those researchers from central Europe who, for over two decades, had been studying the elasto‐plastic behaviour of steel beams. Back in the UK, he continued studying this field at Bristol University; he repeated Hermann Maier‐Leibnitz's tests and started a program of tests on frames. The Second World War interrupted the work, which would continue at Cambridge once the war was over and crowned with success by the books “The steel skeleton” [1], [2] and “Plastic design of portal frames” [3].