Design and Control Benchmark of Rib-Stiffened Concrete Slabs Equipped with an Adaptive Tensioning System
Publication: Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 150, Issue 1
Abstract
Floor systems are typically designed to satisfy tight deflection limits under out-of-plane loading. Although the use of concrete flat slabs is common in the built environment due to the ease of construction, the load-bearing performance is inefficient because the material is not optimally distributed within the cross section to take the bending caused by external loads. This typically results in significant oversizing. Floor slabs account for more than 50% of the material mass and associated emissions embodied in typical low-rise reinforced concrete buildings. In addition, the volume of carbon-intensive cement production has tripled in the last three decades. Therefore, lightweight floor systems that use minimum material resources causing low emissions can have a significant impact on reducing adverse environmental impacts of new constructions. Recent work has shown that rib-stiffened slabs offer significant potential for material savings compared with flat slabs. This work investigates adaptive rib-stiffened slabs equipped with an adaptive tensioning system. The adaptive tensioning system comprises cables embedded within the concrete rib through a duct that enables varying the cable tension as required to counteract the effect of different loading conditions without applying permanent prestress that might cause unwanted long-term effects including tension loss and amplified deflection. The cables are positioned following a profile so that the tension force is applied eccentrically to the neutral axis of the slab-ribs assembly. The resulting system of forces causes a bending moment that counteracts the effect of the external load. The rib placement is optimized through a greedy algorithm with a heuristic based on the direction of the principal stresses. The deflection of the slab is reduced by adjusting the cable tensile forces computed by a quasi-static controller. Benchmark studies comparing different cable profiles and active rib layouts are carried out to determine an efficient control configuration. A case study of an adaptive rib-stiffened slab is implemented to evaluate material savings potential. Results show that the adaptive slab solution can achieve up to 67% of material savings compared with an equivalent passive flat slab.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Acknowledgments
This work has been carried out within the framework of the Collaborative Research Centre 1244 “Adaptive Skins and Structures for the Built Environment of Tomorrow” under Grant No. 279064222. The authors gratefully acknowledge the German Research Foundation [Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)] for providing core funding and their generous support. The authors thank Daniel Schmeer of Werner Sobek for his contribution to the benchmark against the voided slab configuration.
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Journal of Structural Engineering
Volume 150 • Issue 1 • January 2024
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This work is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
History
Received: Dec 19, 2022
Accepted: Aug 15, 2023
Published online: Oct 28, 2023
Published in print: Jan 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Mar 28, 2024
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