Design Recommendations for Web-Opened Titanium-Clad Bimetallic Steel Plate Girders under Patch Loading

Titanium-clad bimetallic steel (TCBS) is an innovative bimetallic structural steel with excellent corrosion resistance. The ultimate and critical buckling capacities of web-opened TCBS plate girders subjected to patch loading were numerically and experimentally investigated, and design suggestions were derived. An experimental study was carried out to examine the nonlinear resistance of web-opened TCBS plate girders. Because the experimental database of web-opened TCBS plate girders is considerably limited, a rigorously validated finite-element analysis (FEA) approach was proposed to expand the structural response database. A parametric investigation including 400 FEA models was performed to systematically study the influences of the loading length, web slenderness, web opening size, and web aspect ratio on the ultimate and critical buckling capacities of web-opened TCBS plate girders. A predictive equation was presented to compute the critical buckling factors of the web-opened TCBS plate girders. Subsequently, two modified resistance reduction functions for web-opened TCBS plate girders in accordance with the European standard were proposed. The comparison results indicated that the modified design methods for calculating the critical buckling and ultimate capacities of web-opened TCBS plate girders exhibited satisfactory accuracy, providing basic design suggestions for engineering applications of TCBS.