• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.563-582
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• 2021

The present study experimentally and analytically investigated the push-out behaviour of H-shaped steel section embedded in ultrahigh-performance fibre-reinforced concrete (UHPFRC). The effect of significant parameters such as the concrete types, fibre content, embedded steel length, transverse reinforcement ratio and concrete cover on the bond stress, development of bond stress along the embedded length and failure mechanism has been reported. The test results show that the bond slip behaviour of steel-UHPFRC is different from the bond slip behaviour of steel-normal concrete and steel-high strength concrete. The bond-slip curves of steel-normal concrete and steel-high strength concrete exhibit brittle behaviour, and the bond strength decreases rapidly after reaching the peak load, with a residual bond strength of approximately one-half of the peak bond strength. The bond-slip curves of steel-UHPFRC show an obvious ductility, which exhibits a unique displacement pseudoplastic effect. The residual bond strength can still reach from 80% to 90% of the peak bond strength. Compared to steel-normal concrete, the transverse confinement of stirrups has a limited effect on the bond strength in the steel-UHPFRC substrate, but a higher stirrup ratio can improve cracking resistance. The experimental campaign quantifies the local bond stress development and finds that the strain distribution in steel follows an exponential rule along the steel embedded length. Based on the theory of mean bond and local bond stress, the present study proposes empirical approaches to predict the ultimate and residual bond resistance with satisfactory precision. The research findings serve to explain the interface bond mechanism between UHPFRC and steel, which is significant for the design of steel-UHPFRC composite structures and verify the feasibility of eliminating longitudinal rebars and stirrups by using UHPFRC in composite columns.

• Advances in Computational Design
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• v.8 no.1
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• pp.13-36
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• 2023

The Puebla-Morelos Earthquake (Mw 7.1) occurred in Mexico in 2017 causing 44 buildings to collapse in Mexico City. This work evaluates the non-linear response of a 6-story reinforced concrete (RC) frame prototype model with masonry infill walls on upper floors. The prototype model was designed using provisions prescribed before 1985 and was subjected to seismic excitations recorded during the earthquakes of 1985 and 2017 in different places in Mexico City. The building response was assessed through a damage index (DI) that considers low-cycle fatigue of the steel reinforcement in columns of the first floor, where the steel was modeled including buckling as was observed in cases after the 2017 earthquake. Isocurves were generated with 72 seismic records in Mexico City representing the level of iso-demand on the structure. These isocurves were compared with the location of 16 collapsed (first-floor column failure) building cases consistent with the prototype model. The isocurves for a value greater than 1 demarcate the location where fatigue failure was expected, which is consistent with the location of 2 of the 16 cases studied. However, a slight increase in axial load (5%) or decrease in column cross-section (5%) had a significant detrimental effect on the cumulated damage, increasing the intensity of the isocurves and achieving congruence with 9 of the 16 cases, and having the other 7 cases less than 2 km away. Including column special detailing (tight stirrup spacing and confined concrete) was the variable with the greatest impact to control the cumulated damage, which was consistent with the absence of severe damage in buildings built in the 70s and 80s.

• Journal of Korean Association for Spatial Structures
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• v.23 no.2
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• pp.29-36
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• 2023

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely applied to various engineering fields. Especially, RL has shown successful performance for control problems, such as vehicles, robotics, and active structural control system. However, little research on application of RL to optimal structural design has conducted to date. In this study, the possibility of application of RL to structural design of reinforced concrete (RC) beam was investigated. The example of RC beam structural design problem introduced in previous study was used for comparative study. Deep q-network (DQN) is a famous RL algorithm presenting good performance in the discrete action space and thus it was used in this study. The action of DQN agent is required to represent design variables of RC beam. However, the number of design variables of RC beam is too many to represent by the action of conventional DQN. To solve this problem, multi-agent DQN was used in this study. For more effective reinforcement learning process, DDQN (Double Q-Learning) that is an advanced version of a conventional DQN was employed. The multi-agent of DDQN was trained for optimal structural design of RC beam to satisfy American Concrete Institute (318) without any hand-labeled dataset. Five agents of DDQN provides actions for beam with, beam depth, main rebar size, number of main rebar, and shear stirrup size, respectively. Five agents of DDQN were trained for 10,000 episodes and the performance of the multi-agent of DDQN was evaluated with 100 test design cases. This study shows that the multi-agent DDQN algorithm can provide successfully structural design results of RC beam.

• KSCE Journal of Civil and Environmental Engineering Research
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• v.28 no.5A
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• pp.747-756
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• 2008

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of the important parameters on the transfer length during the dynamic flame cutting of tendon experimentally. The considered parameters were strand diameter, concrete cover thickness, stirrup, debonding strand and release method. Ten pretensioned concete beam specimens were cast and tested. Time history curves for the axial strain of tendon were measured by electrical resistance strain gauges mounted on the strands. Experimental results indicated that large dynamic shock effects occurred near cut-end during the sudden release. The prestressing forces are dependent on the parameters above considered. The ratio of residual prestressing forces of 12.7 mm strands is greater than 15.2 mm strands. Using debonding strand and gradual release are more efficient for applying prestressing forces.

• Steel and Composite Structures
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• v.51 no.3
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• pp.337-349
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• 2024

The growing quantity of tires and building trash piling up in landfills poses a serious threat to the stability of the ecosystem. Researchers are exploring ways to reduce and use such byproducts of the construction industry in an effort to promote greener building practices. Thus, using recycled crumb rubber from scrap tires in concrete manufacturing is important for the industry's long-term viability. This study examines the proportion of waste rubber in fiber form, specifically at weight percentages of 5%, 10%, and 15%. Moreover, the study examines the shear behavior of reinforced concrete beams. A total of twelve RC beam specimens, each sized 100 mm by 150 mm by 1000 mm (w × d × L), were constructed and positioned to the test. Various mixtures were designed with different levels of scrap tire rubber content (0%, 5%, 10%, and 15%) and Stirrup Vol. Ratio (2.10, 2.80, and 3.53) in reinforced concrete beams. The findings indicate that the inclusion of scrap rubber in concrete leads to a decrease in both the mechanical characteristics and weight of the material. This is mostly attributed to the lower strength and stiffness of the rubberized concrete. Furthermore, estimations generated by a variety of design codes were examined alongside the obtained data. In order to make a comparison between the estimates provided by the different codes such as ACI 318-14, CEB-FIB and Iranian national building codes, a calculation was done to determine the ratio of the experimental shear strength to the anticipated shear strength for each code.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.18 no.2 s.92
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• pp.283-290
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• 2006

The paper describes m experimental study on the shear strengthening of concrete beams with exposed wire rope. The strengthening method is using the mechanical bolting of wire rope tensioned on the exterior of beam section. There are two shear strengthening types. The first is closed type wrapped beam section with wire rope like as closed stirrup. The second is U type tensioned at the anchor located in the side of beam section. The main parameters of specimens are strengthening spacings of wire rope with 150, 200, and 250mm for the closed and U type respectively. The shear span ratio of specimens applied by 3-point loading is 4. The results showed that the ultimate shear strength and ductility of strengthened beams increased significantly compared with non-strengthened beams. Especially, the strengthening effect of closed type was very preferable to U type. Therefore, the shear strengthening method with wire rope is very reasonable in view of repair and rehabilitation of beams.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.313-324
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• 2010

There are many problems in application of FRP reinforcing bars as shear reinforcement, since bending of FRP bars is not a feasible process on construction site. Even though FRP bars can be manufactured in bent shape, they have lower strength at bent location. However, there are no serious problems to use FRP bars as flexural reinforcement. Plates or slabs like bridge decks, in general, do not need shear reinforcements. These types of members with FRP flexural reinforcement have lower shear strength than those with conventional steel flexural reinforcement. However, reliable process or equation for shear strength estimation of FRP reinforced concrete without shear reinforcement are not established, yet. In this study, predicted shear strength obtained from available design equations and assessment equations are compared with 211 experimental results. The results showed that among the current design codes, the Architectural Institute of Japan (AIJ) and the Institution of Structural Engineers (ISE) provided the best estimation. ACI 440.1R-06 provided conservative results with degree of dispersion similar to that of ISE. In addition, regression analysis on the collected experimental results was conducted to develop regression models. As a result, a new reliable shear strength equation was proposed.

• Journal of the Korea Concrete Institute
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.449-459
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• 2011

An experimental study was performed to evaluate the applicability of current design code to the class B splice of SD600 reinforcing bars. Twelve simply supported beam and slab specimens with re-bar splices were tested under monotonic loading. Parameters for this test were re-bar diameter, concrete cover thickness, concrete strength, and stirrup spacing. Concrete strengths ranged 24.7~55.3 MPa. Most of the specimens were designed to satisfy the class B splice length specified by current design code. Average bar stresses resulting from this test were compared with the predictions by the KCI code provisions. Based on the result, the applicability of the current design code to SD600 re-bars were evaluated. The re-bar splices gave satisfactory performance for all D13 re-bar splices and for D22 and D32 splices with transverse reinforcement. On the basis of the test result, for D22 and the greater diameter bars, the use of either transverse reinforcement of the thicker concrete cover was recommended.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.21-29
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• 2014

This paper evaluates the shear strength, behavior and failure mode of reinforced concrete beams with deformed GFRP reinforcing bar. Four concrete beam specimens were constructed and tested. It was carried out to observe failure behavior and load-deflection of simply supported concrete beams subjected to four-point monotonic loading. In order to eliminate of the uncertainty by the shear reinforcements, any stirrups were not used. Variables of the specimens were shear span-depth ratio, effective reinforcement ratio. The dimensions of specimen is 3,300 or $1,950mm{\times}200mm{\times}240mm$. Clear span and shear span were 2,900mm, 1,000mm respectively. Shear span-depth ratios were 6.5 and 2.5. Effective ratios of Longitudinal GFRP reinforcing bar were $1.126{\rho}_{fb}$, $2.250{\rho}_{fb}$, $3.375{\rho}_{fb}$ and $0.634{\rho}_{fb}$. All beam specimens were broken by diagonal-tension shear and the ACI 440.1R, CSA S806 and ISIS, which was used to design test beams, showed considerable deviation between prediction and test results of shear strengths.

• Journal of the Korea institute for structural maintenance and inspection
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.144-152
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• 2016

This paper focuses on the experimental study for investigating the performance for lap splice of hooked or headed reinforcement in beam with different depths. In the experiment, seven specimens, with its variables as the lap length of headed or hooked bar, the existence of stirrups, etc., was manufactured. Bending test was conducted. Lap strengths by test were compared with the theoretical model based on KCI2012. The result showed that the cracks at failure mode occurred along the axial direction to a headed bar. The initial stiffness and the stiffness after initial crack were similar for all specimens. For HS series specimens without stirrups, a 25% increase in lap length was increased 11.8~18.1% maximum strengths. For HH series specimens without stirrups, a increase in lap length did not affect the maximum strengths because of the pryout failure of headed bar. For HS series specimens, the theoretical lap strengths based on KCI2012 considering the B grade lap and the reduction factor for stirrup were evaluated. They are smaller than the test strengths and can ensure the safety in terms of strength capacity. For HH series specimens, the stirrups in the lap zone are needed to prevent the pryout behaviour of headed bar.