Investigation of plastic design requirements of u section steel beams subjected to minor axis bending

This study focuses on cross section requirements for plastic design of U-section beams subjected to weak axis bending. Findings of this study are compared with those cross section requirements given in European Steel Design Code (TS-EN1993) which is also adopted by Turkey. Thus the validity of the code is discussed with this study. To do this, moment rotation capacity of different beams with various cross section geometries and lengths are calculated then the results are compared with the cross section classification rules mentioned in TS-EN1993.The study reported on herein involves the use of experimentally verified nonlinear finite element modeling strategies. Experiments from literature are used to verify the finite element models. The commercial multipurpose finite element software package ABAQUS is employed in this research. Finite element models are constructed as consistent as possible by selecting the appropriate element from element library, by defining the adequate material model along with the boundary conditions in 3 dimensional domain and by implementing geometrical imperfections. Both material and geometrical nonlinearity are considered in the modeling. Numerical parametric studies are carried out by using experimentally verified finite element models. Thus many numerical experiments are completed in very short period of time.Cross sectional geometrical properties are varied along with the beam length to construct various numerical beams in the parametric study. Affects of each parameter on the results are discussed after the analyses are completed. Moment rotation curves are obtained to calculate the moment rotation capacity (R) of each beam. Cross sections with R?3 are compared with those mentioned in TS-EN1993 to discuss the reliability of the code. This study shows that TS-EN1993 is not reliable for many beams subjected to this research.