Numerical parametric study on minimum degree of shear connection in steel-concrete composite beams

In steel-concrete composite beams, the mechanical shear connectors are used to provide the shear transfer at the steel-concrete interface by connecting the concrete slab and the steel beam. Eurocode 4 (EN 1994-1-1), provides the design rules to achieve an adequate degree of shear connection. In recent years, revised rules have been proposed for the new generation of Eurocodes and research has been done to assess their suitability. The aim of this study is to complement previous studies and to evaluate the revised rules for minimum degree of shear connection of propped composite beams with ductile shear connectors and symmetric cross sections. First, a simple and comprehensive numerical model of a simply supported composite beam was developed in the finite element software ABAQUS and validated against previous numerical studies. Then, a parametric study was performed to evaluate the proposed rules on solid composite beams and composite beams with profiled steel sheeting for four span lengths (i.e. Lₑ= 6, 9, 12, and 15 m). For each span length, ten distinct configurations were analysed and each configuration was evaluated for five different degrees of shear connection (i.e. η= 0.20, 0.40, 0.60, 0.80, and 1.0). Thus, more than 200 simulations were completed in this parametric study. The results were post-processed and the suitability of the proposed rules was assessed in terms of end slip and midspan deflection at ULS and SLS respectively. The design rules led to adequate results in terms of midspan deflection. However, in some cases the end slip at ULS exceeded the 6 mm upper bound given in EN 1994-1-1 for ductile shear connectors. In order to properly identify and limit the end slip of the unsafe cases, the data from previous studies focusing on long span beams (i.e. 15m