Reliability-Based Evaluations for Non-metallic Reinforced Concrete Structural Members

Modern technological and research developments of textile-reinforced concrete (TRC) have led to extensive applications in building and civil engineering structures. Examples of TRC can be found in retrofitting of existing buildings, facade slabs or bridges. Despite its potential, the widespread use of TRC still remains limited. This is partly explained by the lack of a consistent design framework since conventional design methods utilised for other materials (e.g., steel-reinforced concrete) cannot be directly applicable to TRC structural members. The use of high-order reliability methods to determine the exact failure probability (and safety levels) and derive partial safety factors for TRC is of great importance in structural engineering. Reliability-based assessments of TRC structural members can be efficient approaches to comply with essential design requirements as acceptable low failure probabilities, as well as economic and sustainable structures. To this, stochastic models for the basic variables on the resistance side (e.g., model uncertainty, effective depth, and properties of textile reinforcement) must be derived. In this context, large databases of experimental investigations are available for numerous basic variables (e.g., concrete properties). This paper shows the results of a thorough reliability analysis of a selected TRC structural member under bending load. In this investigation, different reliability-based methods were adopted with the support of an open-source software available in “R”.