Behavior of thin-walled prestressed concrete roof elements - Experimental investigation and numerical modeling

This paper presents an experimental investigation on thin-walled prestressed concrete roof elements, characterized by different shapes, test arrangements and failure modes (e.g. longitudinal and transverse bending or shear). The aim of this experimental program is to investigate roof elements behavior up to their ultimate capacity under different loading conditions, as well as to study second order effects and the influence of transverse flexure especially towards the optimization of wing steel reinforcement. The response of tested roof elements is subsequently numerically analyzed, by adopting PARC constitutive model to perform non-linear finite element analyses (NLFEA), able to take into account the interaction between transverse and longitudinal bending, as well as geometric non-linearity. Finally, an application of the proposed numerical procedure for design purposes is also discussed