A numerical study on flexural behavior of biaxial voided slabs containing steel cages

Abstract

Several roofing systems have been proposed given their significance in concrete structures, in terms of time and resources. A biaxial voided slab system is introduced to improve the solid slab system's performance by creating voids in the concrete and removing ineffective material. In this study, the bending behavior of voided slabs is investigated numerically. For this purpose, a numerical ABAQUS model is presented and then verified using available experimental results. Then, a parametric study was carried out focusing on the plastic balls and their spacing, steel cages, and the position of plastic balls relative to the slab height. As shown in this paper, the presence of plastic balls improves the flexural capacity, because of steel cages. However, the spacing between plastic balls and their position have not a significant effect on flexural behavior. Finally, the numerical results were compared with the ultimate moment capacities from ACI 318-19, AS 3600-18, EC2 2004, and CSA A23.3-19, and were shown that considering steel cages have better consistencies with numerical results. © 2021 Elsevier Ltd