Lecture-1

ACE234
Assistant Professor

Department of Architecture
Structure-2
1 Introduction

1.1 Concrete, Reinforced Concrete, and Prestressed Concrete

Concrete is a stonelike material obtained by permitting a carefully proportioned mixture of cement, sand
and gravel or other coarse aggregate, and water to harden in forms of the shape and dimensions of the
desired structure. The bulk of the material consists of fine and coarse aggregate. Cement and water
interact chemically to bind the aggregate particles into a solid mass. Additional water, over and above
that needed for this chemical reaction, is necessary to give the mixture the workability that enables it to
fill the forms and surround the embedded reinforcing steel prior to hardening. Concretes with a wide range
of properties can be obtained by appropriate adjustment of the proportions of the constituent materials.
Special cements (such as high early strength cements), special aggregates (such as various lightweight or
heavyweight aggregates), admixtures (such as plasticizers, air-entraining agents, silica fume, and fly ash),
and special curing methods (such as steam-curing) permit an even wider variety of properties to be
obtained.

These properties depend to a very substantial degree on the proportions of the mixture, on the
thoroughness with which the various constituents are intermixed, and on the conditions of humidity and
temperature in which the mixture is maintained from the moment it is placed in the forms until it is fully
hardened. The process of controlling conditions after placement is known as curing. To protect against the
unintentional production of substandard concrete, a high degree of skillful control and supervision is
necessary throughout the process, from the proportioning by weight of the individual components,
through mixing and placing, until the completion of curing.

12,00 to 600 BCE in Crete, Cyprus, Greece, and the Middle East.

Limitation of Concrete- Brittle, cannot take tension

To offset this limitation, it was found possible, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, to use steel with its high tensile strength to reinforce concrete, chiefly in those
places where its low tensile strength would limit the carrying capacity of the member.
The reinforcement, usually round steel rods with appropriate surface deformations
to provide interlocking, is placed in the forms in advance of the concrete. When
completely surrounded by the hardened concrete mass, it forms an integral part of the

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member. The resulting combination of two materials, known as reinforced concrete,
combines many of the advantages of each: the relatively low cost, good weather and
fire resistance, good compressive strength, and excellent formability of concrete and
the high tensile strength and much greater ductility and toughness of steel. It is this
combination that allows the almost unlimited range of uses and possibilities of reinforced
concrete in the construction of buildings, bridges, dams, tanks, reservoirs, and
a host of other structures.

Construction known as prestressed concrete, however, does use steels and concretes
of very high strength in combination. The steel, in the form of wires, strands,
or bars, is embedded in the concrete under high tension that is held in equilibrium by
compressive stresses in the concrete after hardening. Because of this precompression,
the concrete in a flexural member will crack on the tension side at a much larger load
than when not so precompressed. Prestressing greatly reduces both the deflections and
the tensile cracks at ordinary loads in such structures and thereby enables these high strength
materials to be used effectively. Prestressed concrete has extended, to a very
significant extent, the range of spans of structural concrete and the types of structures
for which it is suited.

1.2 Structural Forms

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1.3 Loads

Loads that act on structures can be divided into three broad categories: dead loads, live
loads, and environmental loads.

Dead loads are those that are constant in magnitude and fixed in location throughout the lifetime of the
structure. Usually, the major part of the dead load is the weight of the structure itself. This can be

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calculated with good accuracy from the design configuration, dimensions of the structure, and density of
the material. For buildings, floor fill, finish floors, and plastered ceilings are usually included as dead
loads, and an allowance is made for suspended loads such as piping and lighting fixtures. For bridges, dead
loads may include wearing surfaces, sidewalks, and curbs, and an allowance is made for piping and other
suspended loads.

Live loads consist chiefly of occupancy loads in buildings and traffic loads on
bridges. They may be either fully or partially in place or not present at all, and may
also change in location. Their magnitude and distribution at any given time are uncertain,
and even their maximum intensities throughout the lifetime of the structure are
not known with precision. The minimum live loads for which the floors and roof of a building should be
designed are usually specified in the building code that governs at the site of construction. Representative
values of minimum live loads to be used in a wide variety of buildings are found in Minimum Design Loads
for Buildings and Other Structures ( Ref. 1.1 ), a portion of which is reprinted in Table 1.1 . The table
gives uniformly distributed live loads for various types of occupancies; these include impact provisions
where necessary. These loads are expected maxima and considerably exceed average values. Live loads
for highway bridges are specified by the American Association of State Highway and Transportation
Officials (AASHTO) in its LRFD Bridge Design Specifications ( Ref. 1.3 ). For railway bridges, the American
Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-Way Association (AREMA) has published the Manual of
Railway Engineering ( Ref. 1.4 ), which specifies traffic loads.

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1.4 Serviceability, Strength, and Structural Safety

To serve its purpose, a structure must be safe against collapse and serviceable in use.
Serviceability requires that deflections be adequately small; that cracks, if any, be kept
to tolerable limits; that vibrations be minimized; etc. Safety requires that the strength
of the structure be adequate for all loads that may foreseeably act on it. If the strength
of a structure, built as designed, could be predicted accurately, and if the loads and
their internal effects (moments, shears, axial forces) were known accurately, safety
could be ensured by providing a carrying capacity just barely in excess of the known
loads. However, there are a number of sources of uncertainty in the analysis, design,
and construction of reinforced concrete structures. These sources of uncertainty, which
require a definite margin of safety, may be listed as follows:

1. Actual loads may differ from those assumed.

2. Actual loads may be distributed in a manner different from that assumed.
3. The assumptions and simplifications inherent in any analysis may result in calculated load
effects—moments, shears, etc.—different from those that, in fact, act in the structure.
4. The actual structural behavior may differ from that assumed, owing to imperfect knowledge.
5. Actual member dimensions may differ from those specified.
6. Reinforcement may not be in its proper position.
7. Actual material strength may be different from that specified.

In addition, in the establishment of safety requirements, consideration must be given to the

consequences of failure. In some cases, a failure would be merely an inconvenience. In other cases, loss
of life and significant loss of property may be involved. A further consideration should be the nature of
the failure, should it occur. A gradual failure with ample warning permitting remedial measures is
preferable to a sudden, unexpected collapse. It is evident that the selection of an appropriate margin of
safety is not a simple matter. However, progress has been made toward rational safety provisions in
design codes.

a. Variability of Loads
Since the maximum load that will occur during the life of a structure is uncertain, it
can be considered a random variable. In spite of this uncertainty, the engineer must
provide an adequate structure. A probability model for the maximum load can be
devised by means of a probability density function for loads, as represented by the
frequency curve of Fig. 1.14 a.

b. Strength
The strength of a structure depends on the strength of the materials from which it
is made. For this purpose, minimum material strengths are specified in standardized
ways. Actual material strengths cannot be known precisely and therefore also constitute
random variables

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1.5 Design Basis

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1.6 Design Codes and Specifications

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1.7 Safety Provisions of the ACI Code

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1.8 Developing Factored Gravity Loads

1.9 Loads in BNBC-2020

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