The analysis of concrete - steel composite beams with partial interaction of shear connectors using direct stiffness method

Abstract

This paper presents a method for the analysis of concrete-steel composite beams using the direct stiffness method. In this method, no displacement approximation is needed. The stiffness matrix K is obtained directly by taking into account the partial interaction of the shearing connector by restraining all freedoms except the one related to the column consider, for which a unit displacement is imposed. A program using the direct stiffness method which is written in Matlab is applied to some simple illustrative examples. The results obtained are compared to those of the other methods.