NAFEMS article features LimitState:SLAB

A recently published article on the analysis of concrete slabs appearing in the NAFEMS Benchmark magazine features an analysis result obtained using a pre-release version LimitState:SLAB. The article questions whether the so-called '10% rule' used when undertaking hand-based yield-line calculations is safe (10% is the margin of error often used to account for the use of simplified, potentially non-critical, assumed failure mechanisms in the calculations).

In the article an example from the literature is considered in which an incorrectly chosen slab failure mechanism leads to a greatly overestimated collapse load. LimitState:SLAB is used to obtain a significantly lower estimated collapse load (approx. 40% lower). The LimitState:SLAB result is also shown to be within 1% of a recently obtained lower bound solution, demonstrating the accuracy of the results which can be obtained from the software.

A copy of the paper can be downloaded here.