Failure modes in recent earthquakes on lightly reinforced shear walls includes rebar fracture and out of plane buckling of its boundary elements. In latest edition of ACI 318 and also latest amendment of NZS 3101-2006 to avoid rebar fracture in boundary elements, the minimum reinforcement ratio for shear walls is increased. This experimental study investigates that rather than increasing reinfo...

A before-and-after experimental design was conducted to evaluate the potential reduction in the risk of musculoskeletal injuries to concrete reinforcement workers when using an automatic rebar tying machine. Eleven (11) concrete reinforcement workers participated in this experiment. All dependent variables (trunk posture, and rebar tying time) were measured before and after implementing the reb...

The background and current state of the art of ground penetrating radar testing of rebar in concrete is briefly reviewed. This encompasses developments of Polarization in rebar detection, diameter detection, corrosion detection,neural network and other automatic method in rebar detection.

Initiation of corrosion on reinforcing bars occurs when a critical chloride concentration is achieved. A universal value for the chloride concentration that causes depassivation has not been agreed upon for carbon steels due to a variety of experimental factors. The chloride threshold depends on the rebar material, rebar surface condition, testing environment, method of detection, definition of...

As a preliminary study for the erection of floating structures using high performance concrete, this paper examines the bond characteristics between concrete and the reinforcing bar. Since the floating structure is constructed in aquatic environment, corrosion of the reinforcing steel is likely to develop more prematurely than in onshore structure in case of concrete cracking. A solution to thi...

Automated rebar detection in images from groundpenetrating radar (GPR) is a challenging problem and difficult to perform in real-time as a result of relatively low contrast images and the size of the images. This paper presents a rebar localization algorithm, which can accurately locate the pixel locations of rebar within a GPR scan image. The proposed algorithm uses image classification and st...

The life of a concrete bridge exposed to deicing salt or seawater has often been limited by corrosion of the steel reinforcement. The service life of a concrete structure, degraded by corrosion, is considered to be the sum of the initiation and propagation periods. The initiation phase is the time required for sufficient accumulation of aggressive species at the rebar surface to initiate corros...

The synthesis of rebar graphene on Cu substrates is described using functionalized boron nitride nanotubes (BNNTs) that were annealed or subjected to chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth of graphene. Characterization shows that the BNNTs partially unzip and form a reinforcing bar (rebar) network within the graphene layer that enhances the mechanical strength through covalent bonds. The rebar ...

Micro cracks occurring in concrete around tensile rebar is well known latent damage phenomenon. These micro cracks develop, and can be detected after reaching the surface of the concrete. Detection of these cracks before they are fully formed is preferable, but observing the whole crack structure is difficult. Another problem is repairing micro cracks under the concrete surface. The autogenous ...

As the cylindrical sp(2)-bonded carbon allotrope, carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been widely used to reinforce bulk materials such as polymers, ceramics, and metals. However, both the concept demonstration and the fundamental understanding on how 1D CNTs reinforce atomically thin 2D layered materials, such as graphene, are still absent. Here, we demonstrate the successful synthesis of CNT-toughen...