Shear buckling of stainless steel plate girders with non-rigid end posts

This paper presents an experimental and numerical study of stainless steel plate girders with non-rigid end posts. Stereo vision digital image correlation was employed to continuously measure the deformed shape and the corresponding three-dimensional displacements of the lean duplex specimen, which enabled the full deformation history of the whole web of the plate girder to be traced. Following the experimental investigation, a finite element study was conducted and validated. Subsequently, a sensitivity analysis was performed to investigate the effectiveness of all design parameters in order to give directions for improvement. The comparisons showed that the European code leads to acceptable strength predictions, yet further improvements remain possible to more accurately predict the contribution of the flange, and to include the contribution of the stiffness of the non-rigid end post to this instability phenomenon