Design of Experiment for Facilitating Effective Research Program Development

Considering the wide operation of reinforced concrete (RC) structures under the impact of aggressive environments, compound experimental studies of different strengthening techniques have reached their topicality recently. However, experimental investigation on a large number of samples requires significant technical, material and time resources, resulting in important limitations. This reveals the growing necessity of efficient design of experiment, focusing on the most important and excluding less important parameters from the research program. This research aims to fill this challenging gap of knowledge by simulation-driven research program development performed with the use of the Ansys DesignXplorer application integrated in Ansys Workbench. As the main object for design exploration is chosen the RC beam with corrosion damage of rebar, subjected to bending loading. It was considered that the beam is strengthened with carbon-fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) tape with different dimensions, serving as the input parameters. Automatic goal-driven optimization of the response surface enabled identification of the potentially influential parameters of the studied structure and feasible changing parameter for further experimental study. Also, sensitivity and correlation analysis were performed, facilitating the general understanding of the relationships between input and output parameters Furthermore, the robustness of the structure was assessed with the probabilistic analysis according to 6σ- criterion.