Design Resistance of Welded Knees in Steel Frames

The paper presents issues related to calculations of welded knee joints, in which the interconnected load-bearing elements, beams and columns, can be made from plate girders with slender webs. At the beginning, a typical knee joint of portal steel frame was characterized, along with presentation of calculations for the internal forces in characteristic zones of the knee, i.e. in tension, shear, and compression zone. Then, the checking procedures of resistance were presented in detail for each designated knee zone, paying particular attention to the influence of complex stresses state and loss of stability in the shear and the compression part of knee joint. The work also presents a comprehensive calculation example, which illustrates the described method usage in practical design of welded knees of steel frames.