Characterizing old reinforced-concrete structures for compliance with new standard requirements

摘要

The rehabilitation of old reinforced-concrete structures raises the problem of satisfying new standard requirements, characterized by a more conservative approach with respect to that of standards in force at the time of construction. In addition, the quality of construction materials has to be evaluated in order to assess their actual state with respect to the original one. In this paper, a procedure is suggested to recover reliable information on the original status of the materials in service in order to make safe the life prediction of reinforced concrete structures. This procedure is articulated into various phases, from widespread non-destructive analysis on working materials, evaluated referring to few pointwise mechanical characterizations, to calculations developed for the most significant structural frames. The same procedure was applied to a 50-year old building in order to evaluate the effectiveness of this method.