Analytical modeling of thick/stiffened base plates with internal anchor rods under eccentric compressive and tensile loads

To date, some analytical issues of base plate connections such as the contribution of internal rows of tensile anchor rods and the case of eccentric tensile loads have not been addressed in design guidelines. In this paper, extended analytical approaches were proposed to obtain closed-form solutions capable to study such analysis cases. The predicted results were compared to those of existing experiments as well as numerical models for an example problem, illustrating fairly good agreement, since relative errors were less than 10%. The contribution of internal rows of tensile anchor rods in terms of their total forces was observed to be up to 90%. Moreover, the reduction in the relative errors of the predicted results of the proposed extended method, compared to conventional ones, was remarkable, up to 35%. The proposed computationally cost-effective approaches can be utilized in analyzing the base plate connections in engineering structures, in the design phase.