Influence of transverse and longitudinal stiffeners on the structural performance of Hybrid stainless steel plate girders under shear

Presented in this paper is the investigations on the effect of transverse and longitudinal stiffeners at different locations on the shear behaviour of Hybrid stainless steel (HySS) plate girders using the Finite Element (FE) software ABAQUS. The HySS plate girder under consideration utilizes two contemporary breeds of stainless steel such as: Duplex Stainless Steel (DSS) material on the flanges and Lean Duplex Stainless Steel (LDSS) on the web. The plate girder is modelled to undergo three distinctive failure mechanisms, viz., shear dominant, bending dominant, and combined shear and bending dominant failure mechanisms through variations of the flange-to-web thickness ratio (tf/tw). The behaviour of transverse and longitudinally stiffened HySS plate girders is presented in terms of the shear capacity (Vu) by varying the transverse and longitudinal stiffener locations. The applicability of the current design codes is assessed by comparing the FE results with the European code, Direct Strength Method (DSM), and modified DSM proposed by other researchers. New design formulations to improve the existing European code and DSM have been proposed.