Modeling of steel-concrete composite beams under negative bending

Negative bending moments acting in the support regions of continuous composite beams generate tensile stresses in the concrete slab and compressive stresses in the lower steel profile. As a result the mechanical behavior of these beams is strongly nonlinear even for low stress levels, due not only to the slip at the beam-slab interface, but also to cracking in the slab. Therefore, an adequate theoretical modeling should take account of the interactions between the structural steel and the concrete slab by shear connectors and also between steel rebars and concrete in tension by bond phenomenon. In this paper a model of steel and concrete composite beams subjected to negative bending is presented. It accounts for the slip occurring at both the beam-slab interface and the steel reinforcement-concrete interface. Some numerical results, obtained using a suitable numerical procedure, are discussed to show the capacity of the model.