Development of a new temperature-dependent yield criterion for stainless and high-strength alloy steels in construction engineering

It is well known that yield strength is an important mechanical property of construction materials. In construction projects, engineers need to consider the effect of temperature on steel to meet fire safety design requirements, making it necessary to establish a temperature-related yield criterion for steel. The von Mises yield criterion is widely used for isotropic materials because of its good agreement with experimental results. However, the classical von Mises yield criterion does not consider the effect of temperature. Therefore, this study aims to establish a new temperature-dependent generalized von Mises (TGM) yield criterion for construction-grade steels. According to the energy-based theory, the effect of temperature on isotropic metallic materials is investigated and the TGM yield function is further derived based on the classical von Mises yield criterion. Further, it is proved by derivation that the classical von Mises yield criterion agrees with the new TGM yield criterion developed herein when the temperature is fixed, which indicates that the classical von Mises yield criterion is a special case of the TGM yield criterion. Then, the theoretical results of temperature-dependent yield strength calculated by the TGM yield criterion are compared with the experimental results, based on high-temperature tensile test data from five steels (two stainless steels and three high-strength alloy steels). The theoretical results are consistent with the experimental results, which verifies the reasonableness of the TGM yield criterion. This study may provide a reference for scholars and engineers in studying and designing steel structures for fire safety.