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A Study on the Shear Lag Effects in Longitudinally Welded Connections Subject to Eccentricity

In United States design specifications, shear lag in longitudinally welded connections is accounted for by means of a tabulated factor, which until 2010 was only applicable to plate‐type members having equal length welds on each side, subject to the further constraint of having a minimum weld length equal to the distance between the welds. This created the paradox that connections with longitudinal welds shorter than the distance between the welds were considered by the Specification to have no capacity at all. Research in extant literature based on historical experimental data developed alternative factors that augmented and replaced the previous approaches, making them applicable to longitudinally welded plates, angles, channels, tees, and wide‐flange shapes having equal or unequal weld lengths, and without any weld length‐to‐connection width limitation. This paper presents the results of an experimental study of shear lag effects in longitudinally welded tension members under both in‐plane and out‐of‐plane eccentricity. Forty specimens were tested representing twenty configurations and the experimental results were compared to three theoretical values – (a) the shear lag factor from the 2016 American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC) Specification, (b) the shear lag factor based on a bi‐planar model found in literature, and (c) the shear lag factor from the 2010 AISC Specification. It is concluded that the shear lag factor provided in the 2016 AISC Specification offers the best prediction of the capacity of longitudinally loaded welded connections subject to both in‐plane and out‐of‐plane eccentricity.