| Steel plate girders have consumed an engineer's time and energy to efficiently design one. Minimizing the cross-sectional area will provide a more cost effective design. However, maximizing the moment of inertia decreases the deflection and increases the integrity of the bridge. A series of computer codes written in MATLAB will help reduce the time necessary to design a plate girder against positive bending and shear forces. The codes, written based on the AISC Manual's provisions for shear and moment capacity and verified by hand calculations of multiple design configurations, have the potential to ultimately aid in the creation of an optimization software program. A preliminary design of a plate girder bridge, with realistic loading, will aid in determining the compatibility of the computer codes to be applied in an optimization program. |
