SHALLOW-BEAM SUPPORTED REINFORCED CONCRETE RECTANGULAR SLABS: AN ALTERNATE DESIGN PROCEDURE

Reinforced concrete slabs are most widely used structural element that consumes maximum resources in the building construction. Despite the large number of slabs being designed and built, the composite behavior of the slab-beam systems are not always appreciated or taken into account. Design equation useful for designing reinforced concrete slab supported over the shallow in-built beams, and cast monolithic along with the slab is presented herein. The use of these beams becomes mandatory in the buildings due to some architectural constraints (e.g. low ceiling height or very long spans etc). To validate the analytical results from the proposed design equations, these are compared with results from well-established literature on the slab analysis and are found to be in good agreement. Working procedure is illustrated with the help of design examples and it is shown that with the use of shallow beam, the unit cost of material-consumption comes out to be nearly same (within 5 to 10%), but the beam-drop reduces by 46% in comparison to the slabs supported over the non-shallow (rigid) beams.