Engineering and Technology Journal

Abstract

Uniformly loaded rigid – plastic reinforced concrete (RC) square slabs having
six different cases of boundary restraints have been recently analyzed(1) under the
combined effect of bending and membrane action, and a separate load – deflection
relationship for each slab case has been obtained. In this paper, the load –
deflection behaviour of all these six slab cases is expressed in one single compact
equation as a function of the slab material properties and the configuration of the
slab boundary restraints. The application of the proposed equation in the analysis
of a typical RC Square slab indicates that when two or more edges of the slab are
restrained against rotation and horizontal translation the live load carrying
capacity of the slab can reach up to five times that suggested by the simple yield
line theory.