Buckling behavior of stiffened plates in concrete-filled steel tubular bridge towers

Abstract

<p>The steel panels on concrete-filled steel tubular bridge towers are large aspect ratio stiffened plates subject to unilateral restraint from concrete, whose local stability performance can be improved by setting multiple longitudinal stiffeners. In this paper, the elastic buckling coefficient of such a unilaterally restrained stiffened plate was derived using the Ritz method. Then, the critical relative stiffness of the stiffeners was proposed to identify the buckling mode of the plate. Further, the effective area method was proposed to evaluate the ultimate strength of the stiffened plates. The numerical simulation of the unilaterally restrained stiffened plates under axial compression was conducted using the verified finite element models. The results show that the buckling coefficient and effective area method proposed in this paper can evaluate the ultimate strength of unilaterally restrained stiffened plates under axial compression with high accuracy.</p>