A General Equation for the Flexural – Membrane Behaviour of Rigid – Plastic RC Square Slabs Having Variously Restrained Edges

Abstract

Uniformly loaded rigid – plastic reinforced concrete (RC) square slabs havingsix different cases of boundary restraints have been recently analyzed(1) under thecombined effect of bending and membrane action, and a separate load – deflectionrelationship 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 compactequation as a function of the slab material properties and the configuration of theslab boundary restraints. The application of the proposed equation in the analysisof a typical RC Square slab indicates that when two or more edges of the slab arerestrained against rotation and horizontal translation the live load carryingcapacity of the slab can reach up to five times that suggested by the simple yieldline theory.