Overall Lateral Buckling of Through Plate Girder Bridges

Abstract

This paper developesthe strict theory on the lateral buckling of a through plate girder bridge, and simple approximate formulae for critical loads have been proposed.The validity of this theory has been examined by comparing with some experimental results, and the elastic lateral buckling loads and the load carrying capacities for the illustrative practical bridge models have been calculated.The results have shown that the approximate formulae for critical values of symmetric and asymmetric elastic buckling under uniformly distributed load have to be useful, and that the load carrying capacity for long spans would depend on asymmetric overall lateral buckling. The symmetric buckling will be not so significant.I.