Slab Reinforcement Contributions to Negative Moment Strength of Reinforced Concrete T-Beam with High Strength Steel at Exterior Beam-Column Joints

Abstract Previous studies have revealed that the contribution of slab reinforcement to the T-beam flexural strength in negative moment regions are not negligible for the seismic capacity design. An effective slab width (i.e., effective width of flanged section) has been proposed, within which the slab reinforcement needs to be included in the calculation of the beam nominal flexural strength in negative moment regions. These studies mainly focused on the cases using normal-strength steel in moment resisting frames. However, recently high-strength steel has been widely used in reinforced concrete moment resisting frames in high seismic regions to avoid congestion near beam-column joints. The use of high-strength steel may affect the beam stiffness due to the fact that it will require less amount of reinforcement, and result in a different normal stress distribution compared to the case with normal-strength steel. Therefore, this paper investigates the slab reinforcement contribution to the flexural strength of the reinforced concrete T-beam designed with high-strength steel in negative moment regions at exterior beam-column joints, for which nonlinear pushover analyses were conducted. Beam reinforcement grade was considered as a primary parameter with several other design variables including slab thickness, height, and span length of the beam. Analytical results show that the use of high-strength steel can result in a wider effective slab width than the case of normal-strength steel for calculating the beam nominal flexural strength under the negative moment. Based on these results, new design equations were proposed.