Application of Satisfaction Curve to Concrete Material

This paper presents a systematic approach for estimating material performance of concrete mixture design based on satisfaction curves developed from statistical evaluation of existing or newly obtained material property related data. In performance based material design (PBMD) method, concrete material used for construction of a structure is designed considering a structure's specified performance requirements based on its usage and characteristics such as environmental conditions, structure types, expected design life, etc.Satisfaction curves express the probabilities that one component of substrates (i.e., aggregate size, cement content, etc) of concrete mixture will sustain different criterion value for a given concrete mixture design. This study presents a statistical analysis method for setting up concrete material parameter versus concrete criterion relationships in the form of satisfaction curves and for estimating confidence bounds on these satisfaction curves. This paper also presents an analysis method to combine multiple satisfaction curves to form one unique satisfaction curve that can relate the performance of concrete to a single evaluating value. Based on several evaluated mixture design examples for various material properties, the validity of the proposed method is discussed in detail.