Optimized dimensioning of steel-concrete composite beams

Abstract The steel-concrete composite sections are often used in civil building in Brazil and around the world. The connection of the steel profile and the concrete slab increases the performance of the composite structural element due to the use of the advantages of each material. In this article, a bar element is used with an interface element for nonlinear analysis of steel-concrete composite beams with partial interaction. The objective is to develop an algorithm that uses this analysis tool to design steel-concrete composite beams looking for project optimized in terms of material costs. Defined spans, supports, ultimate and service load, an optimization algorithm is used to define the dimensions of the rectangular cross section of the concrete slab, I-shaped steel profile, and the reinforcement bars of the concrete slab, so that the quantity of these materials are the minimum to ensure structural safety, considering the ultimate and service limit states. The design constraints are obtained from building code requirements for concrete, steel and composite structures. The objective function is defined as the cost per unit length of the composite beam, obtained from the unit cost of each material, steel, concrete and reinforcement. In the optimization process, the iterative method sequential linear programming is used, in which the nonlinear problem is approximated by a sequence of linear problems, which has its optimum point defined step by step by the Simplex method. Examples of composite beams with ultimate loads defined in the literature were used to validate the implementations. Other examples were analyzed, being evaluated at each iteration the restrictions and objective function to verify the efficiency of the algorithm.