Imperfection Sensitivity of Plastic Shear Buckling Behavior in Corrugated Web Stainless Steel beams

The shear behavior of corrugated web beams can be highly sensitive to the presence of initial imperfections. The designer has, in general, no prior information about the mechanical and geometric imperfections of welded elements. As a solution, in a FEM‐based design, the eigen buckling deformations with an equivalent maximum magnitude are included as an equivalent initial imperfection in a nonlinear analysis to account for the simultaneous effects of geometric imperfections and residual stresses. Previous researchers investigated the effects of initial imperfections in the form of different eigenmodes found via linear buckling analysis. They concluded that the shear strength rises with mode number, with the first mode providing the most crucial condition. However, it is shown in this paper that such a methodology is not applicable to stainless steel corrugated web beams in the medium slenderness ratio range when shear yielding precedes shear buckling. It is observed that, unlike in elastic buckling, in plastic buckling the first buckling mode does not result in the minimum strength. The results show that in FEM‐based design, using the first mode instead of the critical mode as the shape of the initial imperfection can result in a maximum of 19% and 31% overestimation of the ultimate shear capacity for the imperfection amplitudes of t_w and h_w/200, respectively.