Effects of Initial Geometric Imperfections on the Stability of Steel-Concrete Composite Ribbed Shell

Abstract

The paper proposed a new system of spatial structure: steel- concrete composite ribbed shell, and briefly compared the three analysis methods considering the initial imperfections of structures: the random imperfection mode method, the consistent imperfection mode method and the improved random imperfection mode method. By using of the consistent imperfection mode method and nonlinear finite element analysis software ANSYS, we analyzed a composite steel-concrete ribbed shell with the span of 40m and span ratio f/L=1/4, which is simply supported at its surrounding and is subjected to uniform loading along it’s whole span. The critical load and instability regions of this shell are presented. The results show that with the increasing of the initial imperfections, the value of critical load decreased from 27% to 36%; the trend of load-displacement curve and the location of structural instability regions remain unchanged, only the shape of instability regions will change. This indicted that the effect of the initial imperfections within composite ribbed shell is far less than its influence to the single-layer shell. The steel-concrete composed ribbed shell is not sensitive to the initial geometric imperfections and shows a strong post-buckling performance.