Flitch Plate Beam Design Article 3

[WillisV]

The topic of flitch plate beams seems to come up a good bit on this forum - this month's Structure magazine has a quick article on the basics for their design:

http://www.structuremag.org/archive...m Exp Flitch Plates DeStefano-pac-5-10-07.pdf

 

[JAE]

Nice find WillisV - you might want to write a FAQ for this so we can reference it in the future.

 

[Lion06]

Just a thought - but now with the nonacceptance of steel ASD as it was once known does a flitch plate beam now need to be checked twice? One check using service loads for the wood stresses (unless you use LRFD for wood, but I don't know anyone who does) and another check using factored loads for the steel?

 

[UcfSE]

StructuralEIT, not exactly. You should always do two checks for your flitch plates: one with the section transformed to wood using wood design strength and one for steel using steel design strength. You use the one with the lowest design moment, which is what the author implies when disucssing the controlling material for doug fir and for LVL. Of course, you should use ASD for both or LRFD for both.