High-strength steel contributes to further structural rationalization of steel bridges by weight reduction of members. However, since the yield-to-tensile strength ratio is higher than 0.90, connected members’ failure occurs at the bolted joints before the gross area members have been plastic-deformed sufficiently. Staggered arrangement could be a countermeasure to this problem by an increase of the effective resisting area. This paper conducted tensile tests of staggered perforated-plate made by SBHS 500 and 700, known as the newest HSS in Japan, to investigate the yielding progress process, ultimate resistance and failure modes.
