Collapse Behavior of Composite Plate Girders Loaded in Shear

This paper is concerned with the ultimate shear capacity of steel-concrete composite plate girders in which one of the flanges of the steel girder is connected to reinforced concrete slab through shear connectors so that the steel girder and the slab act compositely as a single unit. The analysis of such girders becomes complex and it is necessary to have a simple method for design office use. Therefore, an attempt is made in this paper to propose an analytical method to determine the shear strength of a web panel in the girder. The method considers the tension field action in the plate girder web panel and shear failure of concrete slab. The method is approximate and can be applied to composite plate girders at the preliminary stages of design. The predicted results are compared with the corresponding experimental values for girders tested by other researchers and also with finite-element predictions. The predictions are found to be accurate enough for any design office use. DOI: 10.1061/(ASCE)ST.1943-541X.0000467. (C) 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.