Static behavior of ribbed folded plate roof under vertical uniform load—Experimental study and meshfree method analysis

Abstract

Folded plate roofs are widely used in building roofs due to their light weight and high stiffness. However, traditional folded plate roofs are often limited in application due to insufficient stiffness under the current trend of pursuing larger-span roofs. Ribbed folded plate roofs can effectively solve this problem because ribs not only increase the stiffness of the roof and reduce stress concentration, but they are also easy to be formed into various shapes to meet different needs for buildings. Therefore, the detailed analysis was carried out on a reinforced concrete ribbed folded plate roof (RCRFR) under the vertical uniform load to investigate its static behavior. The bearing capacity, failure mode, load–displacement relationship, and strain variation were obtained through the test. Additionally, based on the finite element (FE) method, not only a comparison was conducted between RCRFR and reinforced concrete ribless folded plate roof (RCLFR), but the influence of material nonlinearity and geometric nonlinearity on the structure was also investigated. Moreover, the bending characteristics of RCRFR under design load were analyzed based on the reproducing kernel particle method. The experimental results showed that this structure had good mechanical properties within the design load. In the overload stage, the concrete on the underside of the structure was severely damaged. Furthermore, the yielding of the ribbed plate's reinforcing bars caused the increased vertical deformation difference between the ribbed plate and the top chord, and the ribbed plate and the central ridge beam. Eventually, the failure of the anchorage of the ribbed plate's reinforcing bars anchored in the central ridge beam and the top chord led to the loss of structural load-bearing capacity. The FE analysis results demonstrated that ribs enhance the stiffness of the structure, with material nonlinearity having the primary impact and geometric nonlinearity exerting a secondary effect. The meshfree method analysis was in concordance with the experimental results as well as those of the FE analysis.