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003612
2021-05-20

RFEM 5 / RSTAB 8 | Cause of Error in Cross-Section Design of Flat Steel in STEEL EC3

For the cross-section design of a flat steel, I obtain abnormally high shear stresses due to the torsion in the STEEL EC3 add-on module, which can be disproved by a simple manual calculation. What is the error?


Answer:

Most likely, the error is in the selection of the cross-section:

For steel design, a thin-walled flat bar cross-section should be selected instead of a rectangular solid cross-section.

The high shear stress of a solid cross-section is due to the existing stress points of the cross-section, or the corresponding thickness of this stress point.

In the case of a thin-walled flat bar cross-section, there are four stress points at the corner points of the cross-section with the corresponding thickness t = 10 mm.

For a solid cross-section, however, there is another stress point in the center, where the maximum of height h or width b is assumed as the thickness t for this cross-section type. In this case, the width b is 200 mm.

This results in a small torsional section modulus Wt and the correspondingly high shear stress.

The solution is, as described above, to select a flat bar in the main program.


Author

Frank is responsible for quality assurance in the RFEM program and also assists with customer support. He oversees technical design processes and contributes to the stability and reliability of the software.

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