STRENGTH DESIGN OF REINFORCED CONCRETE SECTIONS BASED ON A NUMERICAL OPTIMIZATION METHOD

Abstract

Reinforced concrete structures are widely used in construction of civil infrastructures. Classical methods are available for the analysis and design of reinforced concrete members, such as beams or columns, which are typically done by hand or using a spreadsheet program. In this study, an analysis and design approach of reinforced concrete sections is developed based on a numerical optimization method, and applied in accordance with the latest concrete design code. The basic idea of the proposed approach is to derive an optimization formulation in order to determine the minimum steel area required to support a given factored load combinations applied on a concrete section. A rigorously derived analysis and design framework of general beam sections is presented. For practical applications by civil and structural engineers, the readily-available optimization solver in Microsoft Excel spreadsheet is used. To illustrate the applicability of the approach, a numerical example with different analysis and design cases is studied. The proposed analysis and design approach using numerical optimization and spreadsheet solver works very well and is easy to implement in the Excel environment. The analysis and design results compare well with hand calculation results based on the classical method.