Fatigue of transverse stiffeners in light crane runway beams

The supporting structure of an overhead travelling crane is subject to cyclic loading. The crane runway beams are parts of this structure travelled over by the crane during each crane passage. Therefore, their fatigue strength has to be verified according to the design standard DIN EN 1993-1-9. For verification, the critical constructional details of the crane runway beam have to be assigned to a detail category. Indeed, the design standard contains only a few crane-runway specific constructional details accounting for the local stressing through the crane wheels. Based on experimental investigations on the fatigue behaviour of wheel loaded flange-to-web connections, a recommendation for a further crane-runway specific constructional detail, the transverse stiffeners within the wheel load region of light crane runway beams, is developed.