Smart composite components - concrete structures reinforced by steel profiles (SmartCoCo) : final report

Although a number of researches have focused on various aspects of composite structures, no design guidance exists for typical situations that are more and more common in the current construction practice, such as concrete columns reinforced by several steel sections, concrete columns reinforced by steel sections over only one storey or composite connections of flat slabs to columns or walls. Such configurations can be qualified as "hybrid" structural situations since they are neither reinforced concrete structures in the sense of Eurocode 2 or ACI 318, nor composite steel-concrete structures in the sense of Eurocode 4 or AISC 2010. The objective of the project Smartcoco is to propose a unified design methodology based on the current state of the art in the field of reinforced concrete and composite steel-concrete structures as well as on the fundamentals of composite and reinforced concrete modelling, in particular the concepts of equivalent sections and 'strut-and-tie' mechanisms. In a first phase, a tentative version of such a generic design approach is developed and is then used to design experiments, the results of which serve to validate and calibrate the generic design approach. The final outcome of the project is the translation of the generic approach into design recommendations illustrated by design examples. The proposed design procedure is drafted in a format which is directly implementable in Eurocode 2 or 4 and the design examples correspond to structural configurations examined and tested in the project as well as to real projects supplied by the industrial partners.