TOPOLOGY OPTIMIZATION OF STRUT-AND-TIE MODELS IN DEEP REINFORCED CONCRETE BEAMS

An appropriate strut-and-tie model of deep reinforced concrete beams is essential to engineering designs.But the issue is complicated by the fact that concrete strength of a compressive member is different from that of a tensile one and the design valuables are discrete.This paper focuses on automatic generation of optimal strut-and-tie models in deep reinforced concrete beams by the newly proposed genetic evolutionary structural optimization algorithm.The proposed algorithm acquires an optimal truss model by eventually deleting the elements with low sensitivity number.The finite element models are developed with two different elements--reinforcement elements and concrete elements.The approach is proved to be effective in the application to simply supported beams with or without openings.