A procedure to derive partial safety factors in textile-reinforced concrete members

Abstract

In the last decades, modern technological and research developments of textile-reinforced concrete have led to extensive applications in building and civil engineering structures all over the world. Examples of textile-reinforced concrete can be found in retrofitting of existing buildings, facade slabs or bridges. Despite its potential, the widespread use of textile-reinforced concrete remains still limited. This is partly explained by the lack of a consistent design framework since conventional design methods used for other materials (e.g., steel reinforced concrete) cannot be directly applicable to textile-reinforced concrete. Thus, procedures to derive partial safety factors for textile-reinforced concrete would be a major step forward towards a regular procedure for the design of structural members made of this material.This paper offers a general procedure to determine safety factors. The approach is illustrated with a bending design example of a textile-reinforced concrete facade slab. The example is calculated in a recently developed software package for structural reliability analysis built in the statistical programming language R. For the derivation of safety factors, initial data is required, which can be obtained from experimental or numerical tests or from literature. The paper includes the basics of data evaluation as well as the statistical characterisation of data extracted from literature.