Abstract

In order to meet future national CO2 emission requirements, new challenges must be confronted with respect to concrete infrastructure. One avenue towards this will be through optimized structural design accounting for hidden factors of safety already present in our structures. The potential for reducing cement usage from current practice is vast, but only if realistic and yet simple models of behaviour are used.

Traditional nonlinear analyses of structures involves the application of complex models with thousands of elements and many adjustable parameters that can be difficult to assign accurately. Applying these models to large structures such as tall buildings is often impossible if system-level design optimization is also desired.

The presentation will provide such a method. While using only, say, 16 elements for a simply supported beam, it will nevertheless account for shrinkage, cracking, creep, yield, shear deformations and failure, member elongation, and other fundamental aspects of behaviour. It has been defined to only depend on geometry and material properties and has low mesh- sensitivity.

Such novel methods will facilitate nonlinear optimization and allow system reliability to be used practically by designers.