Deep Beam with Opening

Abstract

A propped deep beam with opening is considered. This scenario has been the subject of past fib bulletins on strut and-tie modelling. The deep beam has height 4 m and span 11 m. The bottom left-hand corner is supported by a force 3000 kN and the right-hand edge is fixed to an adjacent shear wall. The deep beam is loaded on top by a point load 5000 kN at a distance 4 m from the left-hand support and by a distributed line load 120 kN/m, accounting for self-weight and incidental loading. The opening is in between the point load and the right-hand edge. The effective height of the opening is one third of the effective depth of the deep beam. Because of the high degree of redundancy, the program SPM.py has been applied for this analysis. The resulting reinforcement arrangement differs quite substantially from the arrangement in the fib analysis, possibly due to the different choice of boundary condition at the fixed edge.