Experimental Study of Moment Resisting Lap Connections of Trapezoidal Sheeting

Abstract This paper presents an experimental investigation of the structural behaviour of multi‐span systems of trapezoidal sheeting with moment resisting overlaps at the inner supports. This complex system is problematic in terms of determining its load bearing capacity. This complexity arises from the variable stiffness of the profile along its length (simple section / overlapped section), the connection between the profiles, interaction between the trapezoidal sheeting and the support (web crippling) and the moment redistribution. The current design procedures do not fully consider the benefits of the lap connection for multi‐span trapezoidal sheeting, which is clearly over‐conservative, therefore research is needed. To investigate this topic, experiments were conducted on trapezoidal profile M 150/280/0.75 internal support overlaps of five different spans with two different lap lengths. The different spans of the specimens represent five different span lengths of a multi‐span trapezoidal sheeting. The lap lengths were designed with the minimum possible overlap length in accordance with the forthcoming standard prEN 1993‐1‐3 and with the maximum length, where the load bearing capacity of the double cross section at the inner support is fully utilized (i.e. the lap length corresponds to the bending moments equal to M max /2 and higher values, where M max represents the maximum bending moment at the inner support of multi‐span beams). The experimental results will be used to validate a FE model created using Abaqus software, serving for a subsequent parametric study.