Comparative Analysis of Precast Prestressed Hollow Core Slabs

The time-to-market pressure is very high in construction industry. It shortens the project duration and requires faster delivery means. It triggers for having quicker engineering design and analysis solutions for building and its components. The advent of precast prestressed components in construction industry triggers better cost-effective design and analysis schemes for these components to withstand the quality pressure and verification demands. This requires an appropriate modelling mechanism of precast prestressed components. The work undertakes a numerical model for precast prestressed hollow core (PHC) slabs using ANSYS APDL and validated with the results obtained from experimental results. Comparable results justify the suitability of discrete modelling mechanism as substitute to experimental evaluation. It also confirms the usage of contact pairs, meshing and element selection of ANSYS model. The performance evaluation of PHC slabs under single line loading (LL) at mid-span, two line loading (TLL) and uniformly distributed loading (UDL) cases are conducted both experimentally and numerically. The performance in terms of deflection, stress and crack patterns are evaluated in this work. It was also observed that PHC slabs show shear compression failure under TLL and UDL cases. The work is extended with parametric study of core shape of PHC slabs. It was observed that slabs with circular cores (PHC) have higher load carrying capacity with lesser deflection than PHC slabs with square cores (PHSC).