Intermediate Transverse Stiffeners in Stiffened Plate Girders

Plate girders are usually stiffened with a set of longitudinal and transversal stiffeners to increase buckling resistance. EN 19931-5 gives provisions for the determination of internal forces in the stiffener due to deviation forces and due to tension field action. The tests and numerical simulations showed that the force due to tension field action is much smaller than provided by EN 1993-1-5. To simplify design rule and to evaluate actual action of tension field action on transverse stiffeners a numerical parametric study was performed. The idea is to simplify design of intermediate transverse stiffener only on stiffness requirement which is much more practical than checking the maximum stresses and out of plane displacement of the transverse stiffener due to effect of deviation forces and tension field action on geometrical nonlinear model. The parametric study that was performed takes into account all possible load situations such as: deviation forces only (only normal stresses in the web) , tension field action only (only shear stresses in the web) and interaction of both effects (normal stresses and shear stresses in the web plate).  

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