Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 129-156 (2005)
FLEXURAL BEHAVIOUR OF STEEL PANELS COMPOSED OF
BOLTED MODULAR UNITS
H.T. Wong1, J.G. Teng1,*, Z.C. Wang2, Y. Zhao3 and S.L. Dong3
1Department of Civil and Structural Engineering
The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, China
2Research Centre for Spatial Structures, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, China
3Department of Civil Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
*Corresponding author. Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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ABSTRACT
Steel-concrete composite shell roofs (Comshell roofs) are formed by pouring concrete on a thin stiffened steel base shell which serves as both the permanent formwork and the tensile steel reinforcement. The thin steel baseshell, constructed by bolting together open-topped modular units consisting of a base plate and surrounding edgeplates, are required to carry the wet concrete loading safely during construction. The behaviour of these bolted shellsis complicated by the presence of many bolted joints, so the use of finite element analysis is necessary in order toaccurately predict their behaviour. For any such finite element model, the key issue is the accurate modelling of thebehaviour of the bolted connections within a bolted steel base shell in which bending and membrane actions exist inboth directions. In this paper, bolted flat panel specimens under transverse loading are studied to develop a goodunderstanding of the behaviour of such bolted connections and to assess the validity of a relatively simple finiteelement connection model developed in a previous study. Experimental results obtained from a series of flexural testson model bolted panels are presented together with those from finite element analyses in which the existing simplifiedconnection model was employed. Comparisons of results from these two approaches confirm that the simplifiedconnection model proposed in a previous study leads to accurate predictions of the flexural behaviour of these presentbolted panels.
KEYWORDS
Shell roofs, bolted steel panels, buckling, bolted connections, finite element analysis, bolted steel shells
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