Application of Modified Bond Model to the capacity of Ruytenschildt Bridge

I recently gave a presentation in a session at the ACI Fall Convention on “Recent Developments in Two-way Slabs: Design, Analysis, Construction, and Evaluation”. The session, in reality, turned out to be mostly aimed at shear problemns in slabs (which I enjoyed attending, of course).
This presentation combined the proof loading of the Ruytenschildt Bridge in Friesland, with my plasticity-based model that is under development.

The abstract of the presentation is the following:

The Ruytenschildt bridge in Friesland is a continuously supported concrete slab bridge, and was tested in two spans to failure in August 2014. The results of this experiment are valuable for the analysis of existing slab bridges and for analyzing the moment and shear capacity of reinforced concrete slabs and slab bridges.

Earlier analyses found that a large number of existing slab bridges in The Netherlands rate as insufficient for shear. However, these analyses did not take into account the beneficial effect of transverse load redistribution. Therefore, the Modified Bond Model was developed. This model covers beam shear, punching shear and flexure for reinforced concrete slabs.

The test results are now to compare to the predictions with the Modified Bond Model. Since the Modified Bond Model is independent of the failure mode, the maximum load that is found can be directly correlated to the maximum tandem load in the experiment. Comparing the test results on the bridge with the predictions based on the Modified Bond Model shows good correspondence. The results are also compared to a new proposal for vmin, the minimum shear stress at which shear failure takes place. For smaller value, a moment failure takes place.

While the presented results only show a comparison between 2 tests on an existing bridge and the proposed Modified Bond Model, the results indicate that the Modified Bond Model can become a useful tool for design and analysis of reinforced concrete slabs based on the principles of the theory of plasticity.

You can find the slides here: