Shear Design of Wide Beam Ribbed Slabs

Abstract

A method for the shear design of wide beam ribbed slabs is proposed. The method modifies the current UK code design method for solid slabs by applying a shear area factor which reduces the area of the code critical shear perimeter to take account of the loss of shear area from that of a solid slab. The proposed method gives good agreement with test data for internal column situations, and underestimates the strength at edge columns. The conservativeness in relation to edge columns arises because of an empirical assumption made in the basic code method for solid slabs and is not due to the modification that it is proposed for wide beam ribbed slabs.