Comparison of different methods for viscoelastic analysis of composite beams

Abstract

The paper presents and compares four methods for visco-elastic analysis of steel-concrete composite beams. The method denoted as "exact" is based on the use of linear integro-differential operators and besides inevitable approximations of the rheological properties of constituent materials does not introduce other mathematical simplifications. The underlying assumption of the simplified method is that unknown deformations change linearly with the concrete creep function. In the paper, the results of the analysis of continuous composite beam obtained using the mentioned two methods are compared with results of widely used the Effective modulus method and its modified form proposed by Eurocode 4. Results have shown that the simplified method gives solutions closest to the “exact” analysis method.