Bending Stiffness of Truss-Reinforced Steel-Concrete Composite Beams

This paper is concerned with a special steel-concrete composite beam in which the resisting system is a truss structure whose bottom chord is made of a steel plate supporting the precast floor system. This system works in two distinct phases with two different resisting mechanisms: during the construction phase, the truss structure bears the precast floor system and the resisting system is that of a simply supported steel truss; once the concrete has hardened, the truss structure becomes the reinforcing element of a steel-concrete composite beam, where it is also in a pre-stressed condition due to the loads carried before the hardening of concrete. Within this framework, the effects of the diagonal bars on the bending stiffness of this composite beam are investigated. First, a closed-form solution for the evaluation of the equivalent bending stiffness is derived. Subsequently, the influence of geometrical and mechanical characteristics of shear reinforcement is studied. Finally, results obtained from parametric and numerical analyses are discussed.