Papers abstract:

The present study investigated the structural behavior of aluminum–concrete composite (ACC) beams with profiled sheeting by means of conducting four-point bending tests on four ACC beams. In the proposed ACC system, a concrete slab was connected to aluminum girders by mechanical shear connectors developed by the authors of this article. The load-slip behavior of the connections was characterized in push-out tests of connectors. In addition, non-linear 3D finite element (FE) models of the tested joints and composite beams were developed and verified against the experimental results. The comparison between the experimental and numerical results indicates that the adopted 3D model can capture the response of the ACC joints and composite beams fairly well.

Product Overview:
This tutorial provides a step-by-step guide for simulating steel-composite joints and beams in Abaqus, adapted from the ISI paper’s methodology on aluminum-concrete structures. The model simplifies the original study’s bolted connectors into beam connections and tie constraints for easier implementation. Key simulation steps include:

• Creation of 3D deformable parts (beam, slab, profiled sheeting, rigid connectors).
• Application of Concrete Damaged Plasticity (CDP) and elastic-plastic steel material models.
• Assembly with tie constraints (slab-to-sheeting) and surface-to-surface contact.
• Dynamic Explicit analysis with mass scaling for efficiency.
• Post-processing of stress, deformation, and damage contours (DAMAGEC, DAMAGET).

In this tutorial, composite beam behavior under bending is simulated, according to data from the work of Polus & Szumigala.