Steel Concrete composite bridge

Dear Karamba users,

I am trying to make a simple steel-concrete composite bridge. However, I have a problem with connecting my concrete deck slap to the shear studs on the longitudinal steel girders. I add small vertical pins between the beams and the deck and tried to connect these small pins to the concrete deck using the Joint-Agent component. Then I add a translational spring stiffness to mimic the stiffness of the shear connector. However this does not work, the agent-joint component has no influence on the displacement of the bridge.

Could somebody help me? Does anyone have any idea where it’s going wrong and what I can do to make it work?

Niels

Composite superstructure.gh (227.4 KB)

1 Like

Hi, your vertical pins do not actually connect the beam axis and the slab axis as you applied a eccentricity to the beams. This means that your beams lie in the same axis as your slab. In this case you can simulate a translational spring stiffness using a zero length beam with a spring cross section. You can refer to this example.

Shell_LinearHinge.gh (43.0 KB)