الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
slab floor systems have been widely used in residential and office buildings all around the world. Their lateral load response is still partially understood. Flat-slabs can be modeled, under lateral loads, by the effective beam width model which is suitable for the computer analysis. The main objective of this report is to simplify the three dimensional (3-D) analysis of flat-plate buildings without marginal beams by replacing plate elements in the finite 3-D model with equivalent beam elements. The width of these equivalent beams was estimated by obtaining formulas using linear analysis that was performed to predict the lateral behavior of flat-plates. Equations to estimate the effective beam width contributing to the lateral stiffness of the system were proposed. A parametric study was conducted to evaluate the effective beam width coefficients required to obtain the lateral stiffness of multi-story buildings with different spans, bay widths, and column dimensions. Hence by applying the obtained equations on a multi-story flat-plate building, it was concluded that the proposed equations give a good estimation of the effective beam width. Also a non-linear analysis was performed to validate the proposed equations by comparing the results of simplified nonlinear models containing equivalent beam elements with experiments and validated analytical models by others.