Laterally Loaded Reinforced Concrete Stiffened Plates: Analytical Investigations

Abstract

Reinforced concrete plates are the most widely used structural element in civil engineering structures. In the available literature, design methods have been suggested for proportioning the plate systems on the basis of the results of an extensive series of tests and the well-established performance record of various plate systems. An analytical model useful for the analysis of rectangular reinforced concrete plates stiffened by internal stiffening-beams is presented in this paper. This model can be used to predict the collapse load and the corresponding failure mode of the plate system for the given flexural-capacity of the stiffening-beams. The use of the stiffening-beams becomes mandatory in the plate systems to satisfy the serviceability requirements of the design codes, when it was intended to use the thin plates for supporting the external loading, or if there are some architectural constraints of low ceiling height and/or very long beam spans. To validate the analytical results from the proposed model, these are compared with the results from well-established literature on the plate analysis and are found to be in good agreement.