Flexural Behavior of Concrete Composite Beams with New Steel Tube Section and Different Shear Connectors

Abstract

Hollow sections of steel are widely used in many engineering applications as structural members. This paper aims at studying the flexural behavior of a composite beams with steel tubes sections through a series of bending tests in order to study and examine theinfluence of the steel tube section shape, (square, rectangular and hexagonal) with the same shear connector type (headed stud or angle or perfobond) on its flexural behavior and the bending properties of these sections. As well as study the effect of different shear connectors types (headed stud, angle and perfobond) in the same steel tube sections (hexagonal, square, or rectangular) on the flexural behavior of the composite beams. The experimental program (in this work) has been divided into two groups, the first consists of nine specimens tests focusing on three types of steel section. Using shear stud first, angle at second, and perfobond at third as shear connector type. The second group consists of testing nine specimens of composite beams too. This group focuses on testing every steel section (hexagonal, square and rectangular) alone whenusing three types of shear connectors with it. All the specimens are of the same length, width and height (2000, 400 and 130) mm respectively. The tested steel tubes thickness was 2 mm, yield stress of 322 MPa and the ultimate strength was 390 MPa. The resultsshowed that these shapes of hollow steel sections (hexagonal, square and rectangular) sustain the quality of services for the buildings, and these tested specimens are applicable by giving a distinctive strength and stiffness starting from 114 kN as ultimate load reaching to 170 kN. The experimental results proved that the perfobond and angle connector types are clearly effective shear connectors. Shear connector of the perfobond type increased the ultimate load of the composite beams by (6.25-9.74) % compared with the stud shear connector.