The walkability is an important index to measure the load-bearing capacity of thin-walled trapezoidal steel sheets. So far, the evaluation of walkability of a thin-walled steel sheet is normally conducted through laboratory tests. In this paper, the attempt is made to perform this process by an FE analysis. It has been found that an FE analysis can fairly well simulate the laboratory tests of walkability and represent the behaviour of thin-walled steel sheets under a concentrated load. However, because of the limitation of storage and speed of a computer, it takes a long time by many times of trial computations to find an ultimate walkable span length of the steel sheet under the concentrated load that satisfies the requirements, specified in codes. Therefore, at present it is difficult to apply it in practical engineering. For this reason, an approximate method for evaluating the walkability of thin-walled steel sheets is proposed in this paper. The approximate method makes use of one-time of FE trial computation and information from the laboratory tests. The ultimate walkable span length can be obtained by this method starting from the point of view of the maximum load-bearing capacity of the steel sheets. It is an effective method for solving the problem of determining the walkability of thin-walled trapezoidal steel sheets besides laboratory tests.

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