Floor slab design

Question

I am designing a floor slab for the below mentioned view of the building. In the plan view the center part of the portion is to be left empty and the remaining area should be covered by slabs. In how many ways can i design a slab to account for both the loading and the stiffness of the slab. Also how will the loading of the slab changes in those cases.

Sye · Accepted Answer

When you choose the Geometry > Generate Mesh > Create Mesh option, you will need to click on the nodes to define the boundary to identify the meshing area. Once you click back on the first node to close the loop, you will get a dialog box where you can specify the number of divisions along each edge 
 By appropriately I meant a couple of things. 
 a. Don't use too many divisions. The default is 10. You may try with smaller number of divisions if you are getting too many plates with 10 divisions along each edge. For smaller edges specially even 2 or 3 may be good. You need to use your judgement here. The goal is to minimize the number of elements being generated. 
 b. The number of divisions along the common edge for adjacent meshes need to match. So when meshing the regions ensure that you specify same number of divisions at the common edges.

Sye · Answer

If you would like to include the slab in the stiffness analysis you would have to generate a plate mesh. You may do so using the Geometry > Generate Mesh > Create Mesh option. Since the geometry is symmetric, you may generate the mesh for one quadrant and mirror the generated mesh about the vertical planes to generate the meshing for the entire slab. Loading would be applied as plate pressure load.

Modestas · Answer

No, you do not need to merge it. If you merge the beams, the connectivity between the beams and the plates will not be correct.

Sye · Answer

When you mesh the slab ensure that you are controlling the number of plates by setting the number of divisions appropriately along each edge. Also before meshing, check if your beams at the periphery are already split into smaller segments or not as that may also cause the mesh to be finer than what it needs to be. The meshing would automatically split the beams as needed to establish proper connectivity.

Floor slab design

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