Debonding strain for steel-concrete composite slabs with trapezoidal metal deck

Steel–concrete composite slabs represent a very efficient floor solution combining the key performance of two different materials: the steel and the concrete. Composite slab response is governed by the degree of the interaction between these two materials, mainly depending by chemical and mechanical bond. The latter is characterized by a limited degree of confinement if compared with the one of the rebars in reinforced concrete members while the former is remarkably influenced by the type of concrete and the roughness of the profiled surface, frequently lubricated during the cold-forming manufacturing processes. Indeed, owing to the impossibility to guarantee a full interaction between the two materials, a key parameter governing slab design is represented by the horizontal shear-bond strength, which should be always experimentally estimated. According to EC4, the design of the slab bending resistance, is based on the simplified assumption that the decking sheet is totally yielded, i.e., always in plastic range, despite experimental and numerical researches demonstrate that a large part of the steel deck resists in elastic range when longitudinal shear collapse is achieved. In the paper, the limit strain for composite slab, which corresponds to the slip, i.e., the debonding between the two materials, has been appraised by means of a refined numerical method used for the simulation of experimental results obtained on 8 different composite slab types. In total, 71 specimens have been considered, differing for the properties of the materials, cross-section of the trapezoidal profiled metal sheets and specimen lengths.