Effective resistance of demountable shear connectors

Steel-concrete composite construction is structurally efficient but is impossible to dismount where the floor slab is permanently connected to the steel beams through traditional welded studs. This contradicts the reuse and reduce aspects of the circular economy concept which has recently been introduced to the construction industry. Within the RFCS REDUCE project, several solutions have been proposed. Demountability of the composite beams using the proposed new shear connectors has been successfully demonstrated by push-out tests and full-scale beam tests. Both experiments and numerical simulations showed that the composite beams can develop plasticity even the demountable shear connectors in solid concrete slabs failed in a brittle way. To extend the scope of Eurocode 4 and avoid uneconomic elastic design, effective shear resistance of the demountable shear connectors was defined by using a newly developed algorithm, for the calculation of the plastic moment capacity of composite sections with partial shear connection