THE EFFECT OF SHELL SHAPE ON FAILURE BEHAVIOR OF REINFORCED CONCRETE SHELL WITH SQUARE PLAN

Abstract

The paper presents the results of experiments of reinforced concrete shells with square plan, conducted to investigate the effect of the shell shape on the failure behaviors of the shells. The four models with different shapes and different rise-span ratios were tested. Two models of them had reversed catenary surface, and the rest of them had spherical surface. These results indicate that the shell shape affects considerably the load carrying capacity, the stiffness, the deflection mode and the distribution of the bending moment of the shell, and the large rise-span ratio encourages these tendencies.