Steel Plate Girders: Residual Stresses From the Manufacturing Process

The manufacturing process of steel plate girders generates residual stresses and geometrical imperfections in the flange and web plates that constitute them. These imperfections must respect the manufacturing tolerances that are presented in the regulation. In the present work several stages of the manufacturing process are studied, being these the thermal cutting of the plates, the assembling of the beam and the flange‐web welding process. This work is also accompanied by several results in terms of residual stresses and geometric imperfections of an experimental study and is made the confrontation of those results with the theoretical information available on the prEN 1993‐1‐14 and with the results obtained by numerical models that simulate the thermal processes of the plates cutting and welding.