Numerical study of a bonded steel and concrete composite beam

In traditional steel–concrete composite beam, the connection between steel beam and concrete slab is ensured by steel shear studs. This paper studies the nonlinear mechanical behavior and failure process of a bonded steel–concrete composite beam by using finite element method. A three-dimensional finite element (FE) model has been developed in this work. The results indicate that there are three major reasons for failure of the composite beam: cracking of the concrete by the local tensile stress, crushing of the concrete by the compressive stress and extensive yielding of the steel beam under the global bending moment.