Flexure shear capacity of prestressed hollow core slabs

Abstract

Provided that the anchorage capacity is guaranteed at the supports, the bearing capacity of hollow core slabs depends on the shear capacity of the pretensioned concrete webs, wherein the critical section is in a region between h and 2h from the support. For line loads acting within 2h to 6h from the supports, especially for shallow slabs 150 to 200 mm deep, it is likely to have flexure-shear cracks within the transfer region, wherein the bearing capacity is highly affected by the actual prestressing forces at the critical section. Therefore, one of the major questions pondered by structural engineers is to determine the effective amount of prestressing force that affects the shear resistance mechanism near to the support. According to ABNT NBR 14861:2011, the shear capacity is based on the flexure-shear mechanism, wherein the shear strength is a sum of the tensile concrete strength in the slab webs plus the contribution of the prestressing forces at the critical section, wherein a coefficient of 0.15 is considered. However, in both codes NBR 14861 and NBR 6118 it is required that this coefficient 0.15 should be further multiplied by an additional reduction factor in order to take into account the effect of the transmission length near to the support. Considering the current revision of the NBR 14861, this paper presents a theoretical-experimental comparison from standard shear tests of hollow core slabs with nominal depths from 150 to 200 mm carried out in different research at NETPre-UFSCar. Based on the analytical study of each term of the equation for the flexure-shear capacity, it has been observed that the coefficient 0.15 provides a conservative limit for the contribution of the actual prestressing force. Therefore, there is no need to apply any additional reduction factor in order to guarantee a safe design limit for the shear capacity.