Published Resources Details
Journal Article
- Title
- The preparation of charts for the plastic design of mild steel portal frames
- In
- Civil Engineering Transactions
- Imprint
- vol. CE2, no. 1, Institution of Engineers, Australia, Mar 1960, pp. 25-
- Description
[This paper was awarded the R. W. Chapman Medal 1960]
- Abstract
The pitched roof steel portal when designed by the plastic method has proved to be an attractive solution to the problem of low cost enclosure of space which is a major consideration in the construction of single storey factory buildings. However, there are few aids to rapid design by this method as compared with the numerous handbooks which can facilitate the elastic analysis of such frames. When examining the effect at collapse of various combinations of loadings, it is not possible to make use of the principle of superposition since load-deformation relationships are non-linear in the plastic range. It is therefore evident that any charts for plastic design must take the form of an accumulation of numerous possible designs, and the most practical way of achieving this is to make use of a digital computer.
A description is given of the procedure for carrying out the plastic analysis of mild steel portal frames subjected to distributed vertical and horizontal loadings in a manner suited to automatic digital computation. The requirements of the S.A.A. Interim Code 350 with regard to wind loading have been satisfied, and the analysis has been made on the basis on the simple plastic theory as applied to pinned and fixed based steel frames of uniform section throughout. Many thousands of frames of the same general shape have been analysed using the SILLIAC at Sydney University, and the results have been assembled as a series of charts which can facilitate the design of a wide range of single storey steel framed buildings.