Identification of Effect of Slabs on Flexural Behavior of Beams

The flexural behavior of reinforced concrete slab‐beam sections is investigated for the case where the slab is in tension. To describe the behavior of the cross section, the traditional kinematic assumption that plane sections remain plane is relaxed and higher order strain profiles in the transverse direction are adopted. A variational formulation leads to a load‐dependent strain profile in the participating slab. The method is based on the minimization of the unbalanced loads associated with a selected kinematic pattern that satisfies the boundary conditions and compatibility requirements. An iterative algorithm is adopted to solve for the values of parameters describing the kinematics. The paper also includes comparison with experimental results.