Effective Width in Shear of Reinforced Concrete Solid Slab Bridges under Wheel Loads

Just like last year, I’ve given a presentation at the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board. Last year, I wrote as well about navigating TRB for the first time, and how I enjoyed using the conference app.

Like last year, my presentation was in the section about Concrete Bridges. Here is the abstract of the corresponding paper, that is published in the Annual Compendium of Papers:

For the assessment of reinforced concrete slab bridges in the Netherlands, the shear stress resulting from the dead loads and live loads is determined in a spreadsheet or from a finite element model. In a spreadsheet-based approach, an assumption for the distribution of the loads from the wheel prints is necessary. When finite element methods are used, it is necessary to determine over which length (a multiple of the effective depth) the peak shear stress can be distributed for comparison to the design shear capacity.
To recommend a load-spreading method, experiments were executed on slab strips of increasing widths. The shear capacity did not increase with the increasing width upon passing a threshold. This threshold is compared to different load spreading methods, indicating that a distribution from the far side of the wheel print is to be preferred. This recommendation is also supported by the results of a statistical analysis and the stress distribution in nonlinear finite element models.
To find the distribution width in a finite element method, a numerical model is compared to an experiment on a slab subjected to a concentrated load in which the support consists of a line of 7 bearings equipped with load cells measuring the reaction forces. These measurements were compared to the stress profile at the support from the model, showing that the peak can be distributed over 4 times the effective depth.
These recommendations for the effective width and distribution width are research-based tools that replace the previously used rules of thumb resulting from engineering judgment.