Finite element analysis of punching shear behavior of reinforced concrete slabs supported on walls

Abstract

Due to the low lateral stiffness of slabs supported on columns alone, reinforced concrete flat plates are typically combined with other structural elements, such as shear walls. In these structures, the slab–column connections are designed to carry gravity loads only, and the shear walls are required to resist both gravity and lateral forces. Therefore, the slab–wall connections are essential for the performance of both the gravity and lateral force resisting systems. However, most punching shear research and design provisions are focused on slab–column connections, even though punching failures around slab–wall connections have occurred experimentally. Empirical testing of slab–wall connections is difficult due to the specimen size. This paper investigates the punching shear behavior of interior slab–wall connections subjected to concentric vertical loading, and combined concentric vertical loading and uniaxial unbalanced moment using a plasticity‐based nonlinear finite element model (FEM) in ABAQUS. The analysis of isolated slab–wall connections demonstrates that punching failures can occur before one‐way shear failures. Since the overall connection capacity is much higher than the expected loads in most structures, if these punching failures happen they would be localized to the region around the wall end and are not expected to lead to structural collapse.

A study on the optimal use of soundless cracking demolition agents in fragmentations of concrete based on the extended finite element method

“…There are some studies of numerical simulation of concrete performance by finite element method (FEM) [34][35][36] and XFEM. 37,38 The essential idea of XFEM is to characterize the discontinuous displacement field (crack and crack growth) independent of the finite element mesh by adding enrichment functions to conventional FEM.…”