Numerical/experimental research on welded joints in aluminium truss girders

Frans SOETENS

Professor

University of Technology Eindhoven, THE NETH. f.soetens@tue.nl

Frans Soetens, born 1948, received his civil engineering degree from the Univ. of Delft in 1975. Since 1995 he is professor in aluminium structures.

Welded joints in a 30 meter span aluminium truss girder were investigated numerically and experimentally. Since aluminium design rules for welded K- and N-joints in CHS truss girders are lacking, the joints were checked using steel design rules. Calculations showed that the N-joints were governing for chord and brace sizes. Further numerical analysis on the N-joints using ANSYS

11.0 was carried out. Full scale experimental research was successfully carried out for validation of the numerical calculations.

It is concluded that steel design rules predict the failure behaviour and failure mode of the considered aluminium N-joints well. However, steel design rules overestimate the failure load by 8% for the truss configurations investigated.