BEHAVIOR OF COMPOSITE ULTRA HIGH PERFORMANCE CONCRETE-STEEL BEAMS (EXPERIMENTAL AND FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS STUDIES)

Abstract

The structural behavior of composite ultra-high performance concrete steel beam under static load had been investigated in this paper. The study was conducted by both experimental and theoretical parts. In the experimental part, seven composite beams were tested. These beams were divided into two groups depending on variable parameters, the first group contained four beams, one of them was the control beam, that designed to represent partial interaction and the other beams contained various number of shear connectors, the second group contained three beams depended on the different distribution of shear connectors; in shear zone only. In the theoretical part, the tested beams were numerically modeled, and then analyzed using the finite elements method. The numerical models were carried out in three dimensions by software package (ANSYS 12.1, 2009).The main concluded remarks obtained in this paper that; the ultimate load increased with increasing the shear connectors, and the measured end slip value, decreased when the degree of partial shear connection increased from 41.6% to 58.3% to 83.3% up to 100%. In addition to that, the results of the finite element analysis showed good agreement with the results of the experimental tests.