Post Cracking Behavior of Hollow Core Slabs in Flexure

This study aims to investigate several well-known stress-strain relationships for tensile concrete in literature and introduces the most appropriate one for predicting flexural behaviour of reinforced concrete hollow core slabs in post cracking phase. Despite comprehensive experimental and numerical researches that are conducted to understand the performance of hollow core slabs, limited information exists about post cracking behavior and specifically the tension stiffening characteristic of this system. In the current study some relationships that were proposed by other researchers for reinforced concrete in tension and flexure are concerned. Numerical analyses were performed by a program based on a layered approach which was specifically developed for analysis of voided slabs. Different tension relationships for concrete from previous literature were implemented in the code and the numerical results were compared with experimental results. Eventually, the most appropriate tension relationship of concrete for predicting post cracking flexural behavior of hollow core slabs will be proposed.