A BEM formulation based on Reissner's hypothesis for analysing the coupled stretching–bending problem of building floor structures

In this work, a plate bending formulation of the boundary element method (BEM) based on the Reissner's hypothesis to perform linear analysis of plates reinforced by rectangular beams is extended to consider the beams not displayed over their middle surface. Therefore eccentricity effects are taken into account. The building floor structure is modelled as a stiffened plate which is treated as a single body without dividing it into beam and plate elements. Moreover the equilibrium and compatibility conditions are automatically imposed by the integral equations. In the proposed model the final system of equation is obtained by coupling the bending problem to the stretching problem. Besides, in order to reduce the number of degrees of freedom, both the displacements and tractions are approximated along the beam width, leading to a model where the values are defined on the beams axis. In order to validate the proposed formulation, the numerical results are compared to a well know finite element code.