To investigate the long term effect of heavy construction work on the back the occurrence of postures, lifting, carrying, and accidents in concrete reinforcement work and in maintenance house painting were measured. The 32 620 observations covering 272 work hours showed that reinforcement work necessitated stooped postures and heavy lifting more often than did painting. Reported minor back acci...

Reinforced concrete beams are normally designed as under reinforced to provide ductile behavior such as the tensile moment of resistance. In coastal environment reinforcement corrosion is an obvious cause of deterioration of concrete structure, which affects the durability and service of reinforced concrete structure. Structural stability is majorly influenced by strength of concrete. Flexural ...

Concrete is usually highly alkaline (pH around 12), thus protecting reinforcement against corrosion. The occurrence of oxides is favored when the medium pH surrounding the bar is in values near to 9 or lower. Aggressive substances for reinforcements generally enter concrete through its pore structure, and cracks tend to decrease pH, stimulating corrosion process. There are several causes for cr...

Poor fire resistance of fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) restricts its further application in construction structures. In this paper, a novel fibre-reinforced cementitious matrix confined concrete column (FRCMCC) using fireproof grout as the fibre matrix was developed, and experiments were conducted to establish its performance and analyse the mechanical properties under axial compression. The te...

This paper discusses the influence of minimum reinforcement on the cracking behaviour of prestressed concrete structures. It deals with the observation and modelling of the reclosing of cracks induced by a permanent compressive stress due to prestressing. A computerised proposed model allows to determine steel-to-concrete slip, bond stress, concrete stress and steel stress along the transmissio...

In this paper we present a hybrid system combining techniques from symbolic planning and reinforcement learning. Planning is used to automatically construct task hierarchies for hierarchical reinforcement learning based on abstract models of the behaviours’ purpose, and to perform intelligent termination improvement when an executing behaviour is no longer appropriate. Reinforcement learning is...

Introduction The nondestructive, in-situ testing of early-age concrete properties is a crucial point for the progress of many construction projects in the building sector. The application of such techniques can establish e.g. the earliest possible form removal from concrete construction elements, thereby opening highways to traffic or releasing prestress from steel reinforcement with greatest e...

A novel Concrete Printing process has been developed, inspired and informed by advances in 3D printing, which has the potential to produce highly customised building components. Whilst still in their infancy, these technologies could create a new era of architecture that is better adapted to the environment and integrated with engineering function. This paper describes the development of a viab...