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A Guide On Structural Steel Beam Designs

Structural steel beams are imperative structural elements that are designed to offer support to major space enclosing elements. The beams are mostly used in the building walls, roofs, and floors.

With structural steel beam designs they vary based on the design of the building. But, the most common
are horizontal and vertical designs used on roofs and walls.

They are convenient design and, are affected by many factors which include the strength, length, and
sizes.

The main goal of engineer design steel beam is to come up with the ideal steel beams that would meet
the needs of a particular occasion.

To determine the effectiveness of the steel beams, engineers carry out testing to determine whether the
beams are stiff and strong enough.

Factors that affect the behavior of beams include loading, support, span, cross section, & material used.

When a structural steel beam has the same loading and span, it's performance is affected by the properties
of the material, that supports the beam cross section geometry.

The lateral-torsion buckling, local buckling and the material strength affect the bending strength of a beam.

Factors That Affect The Strength Of A Structural Steel Beam:

The strength of a beam purely depends on its shear capacities and maximum moments, which depend on
the permissible stresses.

In most occasions, a beam would likely fail in three major ways, which include local buckling of the beam cross-section, length lateral-torsion buckling and the material failure.

The material failure creates a plastic hinge, which occurs when the beam bending stress equals the
material yield strength.

In this occasion, the beam bending moment is at it's maximum and, any further stretch would cause a
collapse. A steel beam could collapse as if it has been fitted to a hinge.

The lateral-torsion buckling occurs due to the beam cross-section compression, which occurs because
of excessive bending.

The bending contributes to a pair of inner horizontal forces that include compression and tension forces.

The tension force applies to one side of the beam keep it straight between the supports.

On the other hand, the compression force causes the beam to buckle. But, because one side of the beam
is straight, the beam buckles sideways.

Structural Steel Beam Buckling Can Be Prevented By Restraining
The Beam Laterally.

Ensuring the beam is adequately restrained would prevent the sideway movement, which might also occur
at the discrete points.

The structural steel beam designs for floor can be restrained immediately with a floor slab. Furthermore, if some parts of the beam are extremely slender, local buckling may occur.

Factors that cause local buckling failure include the beam's slenderness ratio, bending moment diagram shape, individual's proportion parts such as flanges and webs of the cross-section and high shear force.

These factors are imperative in the structural design, as they determine the durability of the beam.

Features Of Quality Structural Steel Beam Designs:

Size The size of the beam is very important.

The size can be estimated using simple methods instead of undertaking detailed calculations.

The highly used methods to estimate the size of the beam include the thumb rules used to estimate the section sizes and the safe load tables.

The beams for roofs are lightly loaded than the floor beams and thus, they require smaller sections in the
rules.

When using the safe load tables, the beam's strength relates to the section modulus and material strength.

Calculation of the maximum bending is possible by assuming every beam has a chance of buckling.

The tables size offer an easier way to estimate the required sizes, as engineers read the numbers directly.

However, the table sizes assume the beam shear forces are low but, guidance is required with issues
that relate to deflection control.

Cross-section:

The size and shape of the steel beam cross-section is highly affect by the beam's performance. Steel
Beams come in either open or closed sections.

They also come in standard and specially manufactured sections.

The standard sections are economical and readily available. The popular standard sections are cell form beams and castellated.

They are very durable. The other available sections include curved beams.

They may be curved to create lovely shapes or to reduce their deflections.

Stiffness:

In most occasions, when the beam is loaded, it deflects damaging the building materials.

It is therefore necessary to limit deflection, which is done by checking the elasticity modulus of the material.

The deflection relates inversely to the moment of inertia and modulus of elasticity.

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