Deflection of steel-concrete composite beams with partial shear interaction

This paper is concerned with calculating the maximum deflection of steel-concrete composite beams with partial shear interaction. Under the guidance of various current design codes, this deflection is related to the strength of shear connectors in the composite beam. In this paper, a shear connector stiffness based approach is developed. This approach is obtained based on the solution for a simply supported beam under uniformly distributed load. To validate this approach, the predicted maximum beam deflection using the proposed method is compared against the results from a linear-elastic finite-element analysis and some tests on composite beams. In both the finite-element analysis and the proposed method, uniform distribution of shear connection stiffness along the beam length is assumed. In the absence of a reliable way to calculate the shear connector stiffness, this paper suggests a simple procedure to obtain this value so that the proposed method may be used in practice.