INVESTIGATIONS ON STEEL-TIMBER-CONCRETE COMPOSITE SHALLOW FLOOR BEAMS: COMPARISON BETWEEN STRAIN-BASED DERIVED BENDING RESISTANCES AND RESULTS OF NUMERICAL MODELS

To limit the emission of greenhouse gases, the 'Green Deal' and the Taxonomy Regulation were introduced in the European Union. This inevitably leads to a change in the construction industry, with the aim of reducing carbon dioxide emissions to (net) zero by 2050. The development and use of constructional timber can also be purposeful. For steel construction, this means expanding the composite construction method from steel-concrete to steel-timber and possibly also steel-timber-concrete composites. In this contribution the steel-timber-concrete composite shallow floor beams are investigated, which reduce the floor height and enable either a reduction of the height of the building or in the construction of more floors. Here the steel sheet and most of the concrete of traditional steel-concrete beams are replaced by timber. This change in material results in a different load bearing behaviour and different characteristics which need to be reflected in the overall bending capacity. The paper shows the results on the investigation about steel-timber-concrete composite shallow floor beams using a strain limited approach and compares these to the results of numerical models using the finite element software ABAQUS©. It suggests that the strain-based method can be a viable approach to assess the bending capacity of steel-timber-concrete shallow floor beams.