NUMERICAL ANALYSIS AND EVALUATION OF EFFECTIVE SLAB WIDTH OF COMPOSITE CONTINUOUS BEAMS WITH SEMI-RIGID JOINT

Abstract

The characterization of the structural behavior of composite beams is directly affected by the determination of the effective slab width. Various codes propose their own definitions of the effective width based on the beam span and the slab width parameters. However, the evaluation of the effective width may be influenced by other parameters. The aim of this work is to determine the most important factors affecting effective width for continuous composite beams with semi-rigid joints using numerical simulations. A three-dimensional finite element model of a composite continuous beam using explicit-solver available in ABAQUS is developed. The proposed model is validated through comparisons to available experimental results. A modified model is proposed based on the so-validated model to study the influence of the composite beam-column joint stiffness on the effective width. Then, both numerical models are used to perform an extensive parametric study to investigate the influence of various parameters on the estimation of the effective slab width. The influence of slab width, the shear connection degree, and composite joint stiffness are particularly analyzed to find out the most important parameters influencing the effective width so that simplified equations for the calculation of the effective slab width are proposed.