A comparative analysis of resistance models for austenitic stainless steel girders subjected to concentrated loads

The increasing use of stainless steel in construction has led to the need of developing resistance models for structural elements made of this material. Unlike carbon steels, stainless steel alloys exhibit stress-strain curves with a pronounced strain hardening capacity and reasonable ductility that should be considered in the design. This difference in behavior makes the formulations used for carbon steel conservative when designing with stainless steel. Therefore, this paper presents a comparative analysis of resistance models for slender austenitic stainless-steel beams subject to concentrated loads. First, the failure mechanisms of stainless-steel beams are presented using a nonlinear finite element model. From this validated numerical model, a database obtained from a parametric analysis that covers a wide range of geometries is presented. Subsequently, this database is used to perform a comparison between various resistance models available in the literature. These models correspond to both international design codes and models obtained through machine learning. Finally, the numerical results show considerable improvement in the predicted ultimate resistances for slender stainless steel plate girders subjected to patch loading.