On the simulation of failure mechanisms in steel structures

The paper reports on the results of some recently performed numerical and physical experiments with steel structures. The experiments consisted of a bolt pull-out from a steel plate and the loading of different geometric arrangements of a trapezoidal stiffener of a steel orthotropic plate. Both numerical and physical experiments have been performed until full material failure. The simulations have been performed using LS-DYNA, a commercial finite element code. The paper discusses several modelling and numerical problems that have to be solved for the successful simulation. The simulation results are compared with the results of the physical experiments.