Experimental investigation of the local web buckling strength of coped steel i-beam with and without stiffeners

In steel construction, when beams have to be connected at the same elevation, beam flanges must often be coped to provide enough clearance for the supports. When a beam is coped, local web buckling of the cope region may occur especially when the cope length is long. The elastic local web buckling capacity of coped steel I-beam had been investigated by the authors and a set of design equations was proposed. In order to improve the local web capacity of the cope region, stiffeners should be provided. However, there are only very limited research works about the local web capacity of the cope region with stiffeners. Therefore, an experimental investigation of the local web buckling strength of coped steel I-beam with and without stiffeners was carried out and the results were presented in this paper. Test results showed that to improve the local web capacity at the cope, both horizontal and vertical stiffeners should be provided instead of providing horizontal stiffeners only. In this study, for specimens with both horizontal and vertical stiffeners at the cope, the web capacity at the cope region was increased significantly and the applied load at failure of those specimens was close to the applied load corresponding to achieving the plastic moment capacity of the section.