Abstract
I-beam is widely used as main structures in the automotive and oil and gas industries due to their ability to sustain axial load at very minimum weight. For any structure, the important parameter should put into considerations are strength and stiffness. A Three-point bending test is a well-known method to evaluate the strength and stiffness of a beam. The existing machine to perform a three-point bending test is the Instron® 5585 Universal Testing Machines (UTM). However, these machines can only measure specimen within 500 mm which is insufficient for a longer specimen. In this study, a new design testing rig was proposed to evaluate the strength and stiffness of the longer specimen of I-beam. For this study, the design of the testing rig was evaluated using finite element analysis for 3 different lengths to determine its strength and rigidity. From this analysis, it is found that the proposed design of a testing rig shows satisfactory strength and rigidity for the length of 500 mm to 1000 mm when loaded with 10 kN force.
Highlights
I-beam structure steel is widely used in automotive industries and oil and gas industries as main structures due to their ability to sustain high axial load at very minimum weight [1,2,3]
The stress results are used to calculate the safety factor to evaluate the strength of the testing rig
Finite Element Analysis (FEA) result shows both stress and deformation concentration of the I-beam model in each case occurs in the middle of I-beam as shown in (Figure 6)
Summary
I-beam structure steel is widely used in automotive industries and oil and gas industries as main structures due to their ability to sustain high axial load at very minimum weight [1,2,3]. Corrosion is known to lead to a reduction in the thickness of structural members that will indicate the degradation of their mechanical properties [7]. These defects will cause failure to the I-beam at lower than the designated load. A three-point bending test is known methods used to evaluate the strength and stiffness of a beam [13,14]. There has been little discussion about the standard of a three-point bending testing rig to evaluate the behaviors of I-beam. When evaluating the large or heavy structure, the stiffness of the test rig can be a critical issue to measure the strength and stiffness of the specimen. Another factor such as loading nose and loading support shall put into consideration to avoid the failure due to stress concentration at the loading nose or supports [21]
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