Effects of Shear Lag in Steel Box Girders of a Crane Runway

The term of shear lag is related to the discrepancies between the approximate theory of the bending of beams and their real behaviour. It refers to the increases of the bending stresses near the flange-to-web junctions and the corresponding decreases in the flange stresses away from these junctions. In the case of wide flanges of plated structures, shear lag caused by shear strains, which are neglected in the conventional theory, may be taken into account by a reduced flange width concentrated along the webs of the steel girders. In EN 1993-1-5, the concept of taking shear lag into account is based on effective width of the flange which is defined in order to have the same total normal force in the gross flange subjected to the real transverse stress distribution as the effective flange subjected to a uniform stress equal to the maximum stress of the real transverse distribution. Some aspects concerning the shear lag phenomenon and a working example for a box girder of a heavy crane runway to illustrate the determination of the shear lag effect are also presented.