aluminium in commercial vehicles - European Aluminium Association

EUROPEAN ALUMINIUM ASSOCIATION ALUMINIUM IN COMMERCIAL VEHICLES CHAPTER VI 61
The stress in an aluminium structure
designed according to
deflec tion criteria is very often
low. In the following example a
steel beam, IPE 240 is compared
with an aluminium beam I 330 x
200 x 6 x 10 (both beams are
shown in the table VI.1). The
deflection criterion is 1/250 of
span (24 mm), the span is 6000
mm and the load is 11.6 kN/m. In
the Figure VI.1. the stress-strain
curves for steel S355 and aluminium
EN AW-6082 T6 is
shown. The stress and strain for
both the steel and aluminium
beam is also shown. With the
same deflection, the same load
and the same span, the steel
beam has a bending stress of
161 MPa while the aluminium
beam has a bending stress of 73
MPa. This is the maximum stress
when the deflection is 24 mm for
both beams.
STRESS COMPARISON BETWEEN ALUMINIUM AND STEEL BEAMS
300
200
161
100
73
‰
σ (Mpa)
0,077
0,105
FIGURE VI.1
S355
EN AW-6082 T6
ε (%)
0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7
Additional comparison of weight-optimized beams are also given in
Chapter III, section 2.1
‰