ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Built Environ.
Sec. Fire Resistant Engineering
Numerical analysis and theoretical calculation of tensile membrane action region of RC simply supported slabs under fire
Provisionally accepted
- 1China University of Mining and Technology, Xuzhou, China
- 2Xuzhou Highway Development Center, Xuzhou, China
- 3China Construction Eighth Engineering Division Co Ltd, Shanghai, China
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Tensile membrane action (TMA) could significantly enhance the ultimate bearing capacity of reinforced concrete (RC) simply supported slabs under fire conditions. Therefore, this paper proposed an analytical method for determining the ultimate bearing capacity of RC slabs at elevated temperature, taking into account the influence of TMA. In this analytical method, the TMA region was reasonably defined, including the defining equations for the elliptical boundary, and the coefficient of increase in ultimate load-carrying capacity was derived. Combined with fire testing of simply supported slabs, numerical analysis and theoretical calculation were performed to study the TMA region and the increase in the ultimate bearing capacity. The results indicated that temperature changes had little effect on the geometry and size of the TMA region. To validate the failure criteria for RC simply supported slabs under fire conditions, the accuracy of calculations using three failure criteria was compared. It was found that w= l/10 provided a good agreement, facilitating further analysis of the ultimate load-carrying capacity of simply supported slabs.
Keywords: ellipticmethod4, failure criterion3, simply support slab1, tensile membrane action5, ultimate bearing capacity2
Received: 11 Oct 2025; Accepted: 09 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jia, Yang, Wang, Yu, Teng, Yuan and Guo. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Qi Yang
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