A finite-strip analysis of nonlinear shear-lag effect supported by automatic visualization

Abstract

The nonlinear shear-lag effect on stress redistribution in box girders is analyzed. The semi-analytical procedure is developed for computing the maximum longitudinal stresses and deformations using the harmonic coupled finite strip formulation. This method is very efficient when applied to instability of folded plate structures for which both geometry and material properties can be considered as constants along a main direction, straight or curved, while only the loading distribution may vary. Sequential execution of the developed software is very slow and produces huge amount of numerical results so it requires suitable parallelization and data visualization that offers different graphical representations of incremental displacements and internal forces. © 2010 Civil-Comp Press.