FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF BEHAVIOR OF POST TENSIONED CONCRETE BEAMS WITH OPENINGS IN SHEAR REGIONS.

In tall buildings, there is a trend towards providing opening through the webs of reinforced concrete beams to accommodate service ducts. But reinforced concreate beams have sectional loss by web opening. So sometimes severe cracks having large width may appear near web opening, and those severe cracks may affect the performance of the reinforced concrete beam. To improve the situation it is proposed to introduce prestess force to the beam before loading. The prestess force is loaded by prestress tendons arranged near the tension layer of the beam. Finite element analyses are now widely used & become the choice of modern engineering tools for the researcher. In the present study the prestressed beam with opening across the web is numerically simulated to evaluate its performance. The problem is modeled as nonlinear elasto-plastic beam and numerically simulated utilizing finite element method. A numerical investigation was carried out on ANSYS 14.0 for a beam with different opening dimensions and different opening locations on its span. Computer based modeling results are compared to the experimental, the comparison shows that computer modeling can be an excellent alternative of the destructive laboratory tests with good acceptance