Experimental and numerical studies on shear behavior of deep prestressed concrete hollow core slabs

Abstract

This paper presents experimental and numerical studies on shear behavior of deep prestressed concrete hollow core (PCHC) slabs. For the experimental investigation, two deep PCHC slabs, namely, HC1.320 and HC2.500, were tested at ambient temperature resulting in two distinct failure modes. While Slab HC1.320 failed in a combination of flexure and shear, Slab HC2.500 failed due to diagonal tensile cracking in the webs. The experimental data was compared with the estimated shear capacity from ACI 318-14 and EN 1168:2005+A3:2011. The comparison basically shows that in some instances, deep PCHC slabs can fail at applied loads smaller than those predicted by both codes. In addition, shear-span-to-depth ratio is a decisive factor on shear performance of PCHC slabs. For the numerical assessment, the concrete damage plasticity model in ABAQUS was employed to develop a nonlinear finite element model which can simulate shear behavior of deep PCHC slabs. Results from numerical analyses correlated well with the test data in terms of modes of failure, displacements at failure and failure loads. The validation shows that the proposed numerical model is capable of simulating shear behavior of deep PCHC slabs.