Transit times of longitudinal pulses that travel near reinforcing steel bars are usually smaller than in plain concrete. Chung first, and then Bungey, demonstrated the importance of including bar diameters in the correction factors when pulses propagating parallel and near to the bars can not be avoided. Besides the influence of geometric dispersion and mode conversion on pulse propagation, the...

Synopsis: During concrete construction, form oil, bond breaker, concrete splatter and other types of contaminants often contaminate reinforcement. Current specifications and quality control measures require the removal and clean up of these contaminants before the placement of concrete due to a concern of a reduction in bonding capacity. This is costly, labor intensive, and may not be necessary...

Concrete cover is the distance from the surface of the concrete to the surface of the reinforcing bars embedded in the concrete. Ensuring sufficient concrete cover is critical for the durability of some concrete structures subject to poor environment during their service life. Concrete cover can be measured using covermeters. In this paper, some factors affecting cover measurement were briefly ...

Brillouin scattering-based distributed optical fiber (OF) sensing technique presents advantages for concrete structure monitoring. However, the existence of spatial resolution greatly decreases strain measurement accuracy especially around cracks. Meanwhile, the brittle feature of OF also hinders its further application. In this paper, the distributed OF sensor was firstly proposed as long-gaug...

Joint connection methods, such as shear key and loop bar, improve the structural performance of precast concrete structures; consequently, there is usually decreased workability or constructional efficiency. This paper proposes a high-efficiency skewed pipe shear connector. To resist shear and pull-out forces, the proposed connectors are placed diagonally between precast concrete segments and a...

This paper presents a Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm (COA) model for the cost optimization of the one-way and two-way reinforced concrete (RC) slabs according to ACI code. The objective function is the total cost of the slabs including the cost of the concrete and that of the reinforcing steel. In this paper, One-way and two-way slabs with various end conditions are formulated as ACI code. The t...

Engineered Cementitious Composite (ECC) is a special type of HPFRCC designed using micromechanics concepts which take into account the mechanical interactions between fiber, matrix and interface in deformation processes under load. While the properties of ECC have been extensively investigated, the interaction between ECC and steel reinforcement has not been studied. This interaction is importa...