This paper presents a study of the effect of local plate buckling on the design of plate girder sections in three internationally recognized codes, the American AISC and AASHTO, and the European EC3. The design provisions related to the local buckling of flange plates under uniform compression, web plates under uniform bending, and web plates under shear according to the three codes are compared over a wide range of design parameters. The results show that considerable differences exist between the American and European codes when the design is governed by elastic buckling. Numerical solutions of the elastic buckling of plate girder slender sections under uniform bending using the finite strip method are used in a parametric study to evaluate the effect of actual plate edge conditions on the elastic buckling strength of these sections. The results of the parametric study show that the idealized edge conditions are always conservative for compression flange buckling and not always conservative for web bend buckling.
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