Residential buildings with slab systems supported by reinforced concrete beams are widely used in building industry. For design purposes, the computation of the loads on supporting beams is performed using simplified procedures, in which the slab is analyzed as na isolated element. New Brazilian code keeps the same recommendation presented in the old code allowing that, in the case of rectangular slabs with uniform load, the reactions on supporting beams may be computed assuming that those reactions correspond to the loads acting on triangles or trapezoids determined from the yield lines of the slab. In a simplified way, it is still allowed that these reactions may be considered as uniformly distributed on the slabs supports. The work shows through illustrative examples that these recommendations can some times lead to unsafe results and proposes a correction to overcome the problems.
reinforced concrete beams; bending moments; reinforced concrete slabs