FEM Study of a Steel Corrugated Web Plate Girder Subjected to Fire

Abstract

The main aim of this work is a computational nonlinear analysis of a high strength steel corrugated-web plate girder with a very detailed and realistic mesh including vertical ribs, all the fillet welds and supporting areas. The analysis is carried out to verify mechanical structural response under transient fire temperature conditions accounting for an efficiency and accuracy of three various transient coupled thermo-elastic models. All the resulting stress distributions, deformation modes and their time variations, critical loads and eigenfrequencies as well as failure times are compared in all these models. Nonlinearities include material, geometrical and contact phenomena up to the temperature fluctuations together with temperature-dependent constitutive relations for high strength steel. They result partially from steady state and transient experimental tests or from the additional designing rules included in Eurocodes. A fire scenario includes an application of the normative fire gas temperature curve on the bottom flange of the entire girder for a period of 180 minutes. It is computed using sequentially coupled thermo-elastic Finite Element Method analyses. These account for heat conductivity, radiation and convection. The FEM model consists of a combination of 3D hexahedral and tetrahedral solid finite elements and uses temperature-dependent material and physical parameters, whose values are taken after the experiments presented in Eurocodes. Numerical results presented here demonstrate a fundamental role of the lower flange in carrying fire loads according to this scenario and show a contribution of the ribs and of the welds to the strength of the entire structure.