Behavior of steel built-up girders with corrugated webs

In order to reduce the weight and cost of structural steel beams, it has been customary to use thin webs. Welding intermediate vertical stiffeners has been the conventional solution to improve the out-of-plane stiffness of the web and prevent its early buckling. Apart from costing up to 50% of the price of the beam, welding the stiffeners also reduces its fatigue life. Adequate out-of-plane stiffness of the web, without welding stiffeners or using a thick material, can be achieved by using corrugated webs. With the advances in the welding technology, corrugated webs can be easily welded to the flanges and are thus an economical and a viable alternative. Though some experimental investigations have been conducted on beams with corrugated webs in Europe and more recently in the United States, and methods developed to predict their ultimate capacity under different static loading conditions, these methods are limited to the tested corrugation configurations. Though testing is ideal, it is nearly impossible to study the effects of all the relevant parameters by testing since tests are expensive and time consuming. Using finite element analysis, a comparatively in-expensive analytical tool, and testing, the behavior of beams with trapezoidally corrugated webs has been studied under different static. loading conditions and simple methods have been developed to predict their ultimate shear, bending, and edge loading capacities. Under shear, webs with a coarse corrugation fail due to local buckling while those with a comparatively dense corrugation fail in a global buckling.