Behaviour of slender plates in case of fire of different stainless steel grades

Abstract

Stainless steel has countless desirable characteristics for a structural material. Alt-hough initially more expensive than conventional carbon steel, stainless steel structures can be competitive because of their smaller or none need for thermal protection material and lower life-cycle cost, thus contributing to a more sustainable construction. Regarding structural fire re-sistance, in order to have a comprehensive understanding of the overall members’ resistance, it is important to first analyse the cross-section resistance, directly affected by local instabilities oc-currence on the composed thin plates. This work presents a numerical study on the behaviour of isolated plates at elevated temperatures, corresponded to the web (internal element) and flanges (outstand element) of I-cross sections, comparing the numerically obtained ultimate load bearing capacities with simplified calculation formulae for the application of the effective width method. Comparisons between the numerical results and the EC3 formulae for determining the effective area of thin plates is also presented.