Determination of shear field stiffness and application in Consteel

Shear fields are used in daily practice in Germany for the design of structures by considering the stabilization effect of trapezoidal decking connected to bar elements. Such stabilization effect can be taken into account only when software with special bar elements with 7 degrees of freedom are used. In Consteel the possibility to consider shear fields at finite element level has been implemented.

Additionally several producer and standard specific methods to calculate the stiffness of a shear field have been included.

In this post we would like to provide general information about the included methods to calculate the stiffness of a given shear field.
At the end through a sample building the different calculation methodes will be introduced.