Plate girders under bending

In a material economy driven plate girder design, the lever arm between the flanges will increase. This leads to higher stiffness and bending moment resistance, but also to an in-crease of the web slenderness. This means that high strength steels can be used leading to a large reduction of the steel consumption. However, Eurocode 3 [3] restricts the web slender-ness based on the formula to avoid flange induced buckling, derived by Basler [2]. Experi-mental and theoretical research by Abspoel [1] conducted at the Stevin II Laboratory of Delft University of Technology, shows that this formula is too conservative. Ten unstiffened plate girders with high web slenderness’s are tested, focussed on flange induced buckling.Steel & Composite Structure