Bending Moment Capacity of Stainless Steel-Concrete Composite Beams

Stainless steel is increasingly popular in construction owing to its corrosion resistance, excellent mechanical and physical properties as well as its aesthetic appearance. The current paper is concerned with the use of stainless steel in steel-concrete composite beams, which is a new application.  Current design codes for steel-concrete composite beams neglect strain hardening in the steel. Whilst this is a reasonable assumption for carbon steel, stainless steel is a very ductile material which offers significant levels of strain hardening prior to failure.  Therefore, when current design provisions are applied to stainless steel composite beams, the strength predictions are generally inaccurate. The current study presents a simplified analytical solution that takes into consideration the strain hardening of stainless steel when bending moment capacity is calculated. A finite element model is developed and validated against a number of experimental results for composite beams.  The validated numerical model is then used to investigate the accuracy of the proposed analytical solution. It is concluded that simplified analytical solution is reliable and provides a straightforward design tool for practicing engineers who wish to specify this novel construction form in appropriate applications.