Behavior of thin-walled prestressed concrete roof elements – Experimental investigation and numerical modeling

• Experimental full-scale tests on thin-walled prestressed roof elements.
• Investigation of the non-linear behavior up to failure of special roof elements.
• NLFE modeling of full-scale tests on thin-walled prestressed roof elements.
• Example of design optimization through NLFEA.

This paper presents an experimental investigation on thin-walled prestressed concrete roof elements, characterized by different shapes, test arrangements and failure modes (e.g. longitudinal and transverse bending or shear). The aim of this experimental program is to investigate roof elements behavior up to their ultimate capacity under different loading conditions, as well as to study second order effects and the influence of transverse flexure in the optimization of wing reinforcement. The response of tested roof elements is subsequently numerically analyzed, by adopting PARC constitutive model to perform non-linear finite element analyses (NLFEA), able to take into account the interaction between transverse and longitudinal bending, as well as geometric non-linearity. Finally, an application of the proposed numerical procedure for design purposes is also discussed.