Experimental studies on shear lag of box girders

Abstract

Two experimental studies on shear lag effect are conducted, one for box girders with varying depth in cross section and the other for box girders under simultaneous axial and lateral loads. Three Perspex glass models built specifically for the research work were used to perform the experiments with the purpose of investigating the shear lag phenomenon of box girders and providing a benchmark for future analytical and numerical studies of shear lag effect. The experiments intend to address two issues, the beam–column action and the effect of varying depth upon the shear lag of box girders. Finite element analysis is also conducted to check the accuracy of the numerical methods in predicting shear lag effect in these two situations. In general, the experimental results match reasonably well with the numerical predictions. However, there are some noticeable differences. In some cases, the difference in the stress predicted by the finite element method and the experimental results can be as high as 25%.