The analytical capability to determine the global structural effects on the strength of local structural elements or regions is developed in this dissertation. The concept is to subdivide a structure into substructures with different attributes. The combined geometric and material nonlinear effects are considered within the critical region, while the less important substructures (transition substructures) include only material nonlinearity. The rest of structures are modelled elastically and condensed as a super element on the global degrees of freedom. The fundamental purpose of this study is to accomplish savings in computing time and indeed to obtain analytical solutions to some problems in structural engineering where analytical solutions are not available in the literature because their solutions would require extremely complicated procedures and a computer of very large capacity.; The developed procedure was used to investigate the inelastic concentrated web crippling behavior of thin-web plate girders under concentrated load. The analytical solutions compared very well with available experimental results. Parametric studies concluded that the most important factor influencing the web crippling load is the web thickness. Yield stress level and the relative rigidity between the flanges and the web are also found to be important. The analytical procedure proposed in this study, established on the basis of solid mechanics principles, is capable of predicting the inelastic, post-buckling behavior for thin-walled structural members and frames.
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