Donghua Zhou

In a steel-concrete composite beam (hereafter referred to as a composite beam), partial interaction between the concrete slab and the steel beam results in an appreciable increase in the beam deflections relative to full interaction behavior. Moreover, the distribution type of the shear connectors has a great impact on the degree of the composite action between the two components of the beam. To reveal the effect of shear connector layout in the performance of composite beams, on the basis of a developed one-dimensional composite beam element validated by the closed-form precision solutions and experimental results, this paper optimizes the layout of shear connectors in composite beams with partial interaction by adopting a stepwise uniform distribution of shear connectors to approximate the triangular distribution of the shear connector density without increasing the total number of shear connectors. Based on a comparison of all the different types of stepped rectangles distribution, this paper finally suggests the 3-stepped rectangles distribution of shear connectors as a reasonable and applicable optimal method.