Factors Governing Flexure and Shear Behavior of Reinforced Concrete Wide Beams

Abstract

Reinforced concrete (RC) has become one of the most main building materials and is being broadly used in many types of engineering structures. High-rise buildings and many other structures due to architectural constraints often employ thick slabs and wide beams of varying width as transfer girder, to reduce the floor height and to facilitate utility services under the floor. In the design of such important members, the engineers must balance economy and safety while satisfying the architectural constraints and design such wide beams within strength and serviceability limits allowed by codes and standards. Many researchers have experimentally demonstrated that shear design provisions for large wide beams and thick slabs in ACI Standards can be unsafe and may result inadequate level of safety. Various response parameters of wide beams such as shear and flexure capacity demand, effect of longitudinal, web steel reinforcement and beam size effect on shear and flexure strength of RC wide beams are required to be investigated. To study these parameters commercial software ANSYS multi-function finite element package was used for numerical simulation and nonlinear analysis of wide beams. Results obtained from the analytical study were compared to published data on wide beams with similar design parameters available in literature. ANSYS simulation results on predicting the behavior of wide beams in this study were found in good agreement with available experimental data. It was also observed that shear and flexure response parameters obtained from analyses were also in good agreement with those obtained from theoretical elastic analysis of similar wide beams.