Prediction of the castellated beams deflections

Introduction. Existence of openings in webs of beams reduce their shear rigidity and increase deflections compare with beams of the same dimensions with solid web. Investigation of the castellated beam’s deflections is important, because one of main demands to beams of engineering structures is guarantee of necessary rigidity, i.е. restriction of ratio deflection to length. In the work it was studied deflections of castellated beams with diamond shape, hexagonal, sinusoidal and circular openings, widely used in structural industry. Materials and methods. Effect of openings on transverse deflections of the castellated steel beams was studied analytically with theory of composite bars, with the finite element method and experimentally on four meters’ double consoled beams under loading with concentrated forces applied at consoles. Results. Universal analytical relation was obtained which allow reliably evaluate deflections of simply supported beams with various shape of openings under different kind of loading. Analysis of results of calculation of beams by FEM using program complex ANSYS demonstrates satisfactory correspondence to experimental data and to analytical relations. Conclusions. Obtained with the theory of composite bars analytical dependences for deflections of simply supported beams are applicable for beams with various type of perforation and different kind of loading.