Numerical Procedure for the Three-Dimensional Nonlinear Modelling of Composite Steel

Numerical Procedure for the Three-Dimensional Nonlinear Modelling of Composite Steel–Concrete Beams

Benyahi, Karim / Bouafia, Youcef / Oudjene, Marc / Barboura, Salma / Kachi, Mohand Said

Composite steel–concrete structures are commonly used in the field of bridges, where the steel frame provides great ease of installation, and concrete provides useful strength at low cost. This construction system makes it possible to seek to use each material to the best of its ability, so as to provide the entire construction system with greater savings. The purpose of this article is to be able to perform the simulation and the non-linear elastic calculation of composite steel–concrete beams through a calculation approach based on a matrix method of displacements. The numerical calculation model developed is based on taking into account the non-linearity of materials, or a set of laws allowing the modeling of the nonlinear behaviors of materials under an instantaneous and monotonous loading increasing until the ruin; the concrete is represented in its post-elastic part by a softening branch in compression and the contribution of the concrete stretched between two successive cracks is taken into account. Steel is represented by a perfect elastoplastic law or an elastoplastic law with firming. The proposed approach has been implemented on the Fortran programming language, where our procedure of numerical modeling of the mechanical behavior seems capable of correctly simulating the three-dimensional nonlinear behavior of isostatic and hyperstatic composite steel–concrete beams, under monotonous (increasing) static loading until ruin. It was validated by comparing the results of our calculations to experimental results or to analytical solutions.