Safety concept for textile-reinforced concrete structures with bending load

Abstract

In most countries, for the production and execution of concrete structures with textile reinforcement, building owners must have a general approval (e.g., “abZ” in Germany) or an individual license (e.g., “ZiE” in Germany). Therefore, it is quite common for building authorities to request experimental tests that evaluate the ultimate limit state (ULS) and the serviceability limit state (SLS). However, these experimental tests are detailed, time-consuming and expensive. A practical and simple design model would help to reduce the number of tests needed and would offer structural planners a useful tool. An important aspect is that such design model must fulfil a set of reliability requirements in order to guarantee an adequate safety standard. To this end, probabilistic calculations are required. For the setup of such model, different parameters must be considered, namely the effective depth d and the tensile failure stress of the textile fc for the concrete compressive strength fc. This article presents the probabilistic calculations needed to attain a general safety factor γT that satisfies all the safety requirements for the textile reinforcement of concrete structures with bending load.