Shear buckling resistance of steel and aluminium plate girders

During the development of Eurocode 9 for aluminium alloy structures a number of design methods for the shear buckling resistance of plate girders were appraised, by comparison with experimental data. Among studied methods the so-called rotated stress field method [Höglund, T., Design of thin plate I girders in shear and bending with special reference to web buckling. Royal Institute of Technology, Department of Building Statics & Structural Engineering, Stockholm, 1972], with some modifications, was found to give the best agreement with 366 tests on steel plate girders as well as 93 tests on aluminium alloy plate girders in shear. The method is simple to use and is applicable to unstiffened, transversally and longitudinally stiffened and trapezoidally corrugated webs. This paper presents the rotated stress field method and summarizes the result of the comparisons, including the design methods in Eurocode 3, Part 1.1, version April 1992, for steel plate girders. The rotated stress field method is also adopted in Eurocode 3, Part 1.5: plated structures, draft July 1996.