Design of plated structures according to EN 1993-1-5 with the emphasis on longitudinal compression

The paper describes the main features and advantages of Eurocode standard EN 1993-1-5 devoted to the design of plated structures. For unstiffened and longitudinally stiffened panels loaded with longitudinal compression stresses all three design approaches, the effective width method, the reduced stress method and numerical simulations based on FEM, are described and commented. With the help of numerical examples on plates with one and four longitudinal stiffeners in pure compression and on a plate girder with one stiffener in the compression zone a comparison among the methods is presented and some possible simplifications of the design procedure are commented. For plates in compression the effective width method and the reduced stress method give very similar results that are also in good correlation to the results of numerical simulations. For plate girders in bending the reduced stress method becomes over-conservative because it does not take account of the stress redistribution.