Abstract
Despite their frequent occurrence in practice, only limited studies on the shear behavior of reinforced concrete (RC) circular members are available in the literature. Such studies are based on poor assumptions about the physical model, often resulting in being too conservative, as well as technical codes that essentially propose empirical conversion rules. On this topic in this paper, an evolutionary approach named EPR is used to create a structured polynomial model for predicting the shear strength of circular sections. The adopted technique is an evolutionary data mining methodology that generates a transparent and structured representation of the behavior of a system directly from experimental data. In this study experimental data of 61 RC circular columns, as reported in the technical literature, are used to develop the EPR models. As final result, physically consistent shear strength models for circular columns are obtained, to be used in different design situations. The proposed formulations are compared with models available from building codes and literature expressions, showing that EPR technique is capable of capturing and predicting the shear behavior of RC circular elements with very high accuracy. A parametric study is also carried out to evaluate the physical consistency of the proposed models.
Highlights
It is well known that columns are the most vulnerable elements in reinforced concrete (RC) structures
The test specimens refer to circular columns characterized by six different diameters and having both shear and longitudinal reinforcements
The compressive strength of concrete ranges from 13.2 MPa to 49.3 MPa, the stirrup percentage ranges from 0.1% to 0.45%, the yielding stress of shear reinforcement ranges from 250 MPa to 1728 MPa, and the longitudinal steel percentage ranges from 2.2% to 5.6%
Summary
It is well known that columns are the most vulnerable elements in reinforced concrete (RC) structures. These elements are principally designed to bear axial loads, but as a result of lateral loads, for example, wind pressure or earthquake ground motion, they could deal with relevant shear loads and should inevitably be designed to avoid possible shear failures [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Circular elements are used extensively as columns in buildings, or as piles for foundations, or as secant piling to form diaphragm walls. Despite their frequent occurrence in practice, only limited researches on the shear behavior of RC circular members have been carried out
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