Steel Beam and Plate Girder Design

This course is a part of Structural Design, a 6-course MicroMasters series from edX.

Built-up plate girders are used extensively in bridges and as transfer girders in buildings.

This course will cover the design of built-up plate girders with an emphasis on proportioning, shear and flexural strength, and local/global stability.

Students will leave this course with an in-depth knowledge of relevant limit states and failure modes as well as a familiarity with the AISC360 (American Institute of Steel Construction) provisions for plate girder design. This course is best suited for students with an undergraduate civil engineering background including a basic steel design course and will build on these concepts.

Students will learn from a top researcher with over 20 years of experience in the field. Professor Varma focuses on teaching through exploring example problems and applications of fundamental concepts, encouraging his students to both understand the fundamental principles of plate girder behavior and be able to apply these concepts in realistic design scenarios.

This course is available to practicing engineers for 1.5 CEUs for learners completing the course on the verified track.

What you'll learn

• Recommend completing an undergraduate steel design course.
• Understand basic buckling theory including beam and plate buckling behavior.
• Proportion plate girders appropriately for strength and stability requirements.
• Evaluate the flexural capacity of I-shaped plate girders regardless of component slenderness.
• Describe the different shear force transfer mechanisms in plate girders including the shear strength of webs with and without tension field action and effects of transverse stiffeners.
• Evaluate the shear capacity of an I-shaped plate girder and design transverse stiffeners as appropriate.
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• _by William T. Segui (5th or 6th edition).
• (free download)