ANALYSIS OF TRANSFER PLATE STRUCTURES USING 3D COUPLING ELEMENT

摘要

A transfer plate is a very thick and large solid concrete slab, which is placed between shear wall and column supports, with a heavy self weight and large amount of reinforcement. Transfer plates give architect and structural engineer a great flexibility in modifying the upper commercial and residential tower blocks and the supporting system underneath the transfer plate in the design process. The tower blocks, the transfer plate and the supporting system, which are meshed separately, have to be put together to form a finite element model for structural analysis. However, the merging of the load bearing walls and columns will be more challenging if tower blocks of arbitrary shapes and orientations are allowed to load on the transfer plate. In order to cope with the most general situation of arbitrary number, position, size and orientation of load bearing members on a transfer plate, the idea of coupling element is proposed. By means of a penalty integral, the coupling element ensures that load bearing members are in full contact with the transfer plate. As the integral can be evaluated based on a Gaussian point scheme, the node for node matching over the interface of two solid elements is not required. This effectively allows solid hexahedral meshes to be connected without mesh modification over the contact surface. Examples of transfer plate structure will be given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the coupling elements compared with results where no coupling element has been used.