Twentieth century brought a lot of forward-moving inventions. In the field of bridges and structural engineering we could witness the birth of the first steel-concrete composite bridges and their rapid development. In 1985, the perforated steel strips were officially introduced to the eyes of researchers by a patent from Wolfhardt Andrä. Encased in concrete to make composite bridges they have several advantages -low construction height, lower usage of steel in comparison with embedded I-beams, etc. In practise, they are mainly used as short railway bridges due to their practicality during the construction works. Nowadays, many research groups all around the world focus on improving the above mentioned invention by tuning the geometry of the strips as well as the concrete dowels to increase its composite action. Such research is also currently running at the Technical University of Košice, Faculty of Civil Engineering, which developed five perforated steel strip types. The specimens are tested at Laboratory of Excellent Research and are modelled in software for finite element analysis (ABAQUS) to simulate the performed tests.

No abstract

Two types of push-out tests were carried out at the Centre of Research and Innovation in Construction, the Technical University of Košice - one at a composite based on steel continuous shear connector and the second one at the same connector, however made of glass-laminate material. For further research, the material characteristics of the material used needed to be found. In this article, the material tests performed as well as their results are presented.

Composite steel‐concrete constructions with encased I‐beams were initially used as composite floors. Nowadays, they can be usually seen as short railway bridges with span up to 20m. Their main advantages include simplicity of their construction, their low construction height and their effectiveness. To make them more effective, the steel I‐beams were replaced with perforated steel strips. At Technical University of Košice, Faculty of Civil Engineering, several continuous shear connectors with new design were proposed. In order to prove their effectiveness, numerous experiments – push‐out tests, four point flexural tests – were performed at Laboratory of Excellent Research. The purpose was to determine the shear and bending resistance of the connectors. Afterwards, the finite element models were created and analyzed using ABAQUS/CAE software. This paper deals with numerical program of four‐point flexural tests of two strips. The most clue modules ‐ properties, load, step, interaction and mesh are described.

The hunger for a better, more effective, more economic, easier for construction, and overall more sustainable bridge design is enormous nowadays. One of the solutions for the problems described is a composite structure with embedded steel beams in a form of a shear connector. The paper presented deals with a study of a suggested shear connector. A new design of the connector is presented - of double dowel type. Its geometrical attributes are closely described and the idea of its origin is explained. The study of the connectors consists of experimental and numerical part. In experimental study, the experiments performed together with measuring methods are described and their results are presented and analysed. In numerical study the finite element model developed in an ABAQUS software is presented with a detail description of the modeling process. In results and discussions the software results are compared to with results from the experimental study and the overall behavior of the proposed shear connector is compared to shear connectors from other studies.