The Optimization of Slender Reinforced Concrete Columns

Slenderness is an important issue in design of reinforced concrete (RC) columns. Especially for long columns, second order effects may be not so small to neglect, but the calculation of second order effects may take too much time. For that reason, ACI 318 design code includes a simple approach in order to increase the flexural moment of columns according to their slenderness. Thus, second order effects are considered. In optimization, the effect of slenderness can be considered by using the factored design flexural moments. In this paper, harmony search (HS) algorithm is employed to find the optimum design variables of slender RC columns. These design variables are web width, height, diameter and number of reinforcements. The optimization objective is total cost of materials including concrete and steel. The developed method is effective to find the optimal design for axial force, flexural moment and shear force values. As numerical examples, optimum design of columns with different lengths, but with the same loadings and material properties were investigated. Thus, the effect of slenderness was seen on the optimum costs. By the increase of column length, increase of total material cost is more than a linear increase. This situation shows us the effect of slenderness on optimum RC columns (© 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

[1]  Victor Yepes,et al.  Design of reinforced concrete bridge frames by heuristic optimization , 2008, Adv. Eng. Softw..

[2]  J. V. Ramasamy,et al.  Optimum detailed design of reinforced concrete continuous beams using Genetic Algorithms , 2005 .

[3]  Ali Kaveh,et al.  Optimal design of reinforced concrete frames Using big bang-big crunch algorithm , 2012 .

[4]  Ashraf F. Ashour,et al.  Cost optimisation of reinforced concrete flat slab buildings , 2005 .

[5]  Zong Woo Geem,et al.  A New Heuristic Optimization Algorithm: Harmony Search , 2001, Simul..

[6]  Boualem Tiliouine,et al.  Minimum cost design of reinforced concrete T-beams at ultimate loads using Eurocode2 , 2012 .

[7]  Víctor Yepes,et al.  A parametric study of optimum earth-retaining walls by simulated annealing , 2008 .

[8]  Charles V. Camp,et al.  Design of Retaining Walls Using Big Bang–Big Crunch Optimization , 2012 .

[9]  Michal Šejnoha,et al.  New approach to optimization of reinforced concrete beams , 2000 .

[10]  Siamak Talatahari,et al.  Optimum Design of Gravity Retaining Walls Using Charged System Search Algorithm , 2012 .

[11]  Antonio Hospitaler,et al.  CO2-optimization of reinforced concrete frames by simulated annealing , 2009 .

[12]  A. Akin.  Optimum Detailing Design of Reinforced Concrete Plane Frames to ACI 318-05 using the Harmony Search Algorithm , 2012 .

[13]  Victor Yepes,et al.  Multiobjective Optimization of Concrete Frames by Simulated Annealing , 2008, Comput. Aided Civ. Infrastructure Eng..

[14]  Ali Kaveh,et al.  HARMONY SEARCH BASED ALGORITHMS FOR THE OPTIMUM COST DESIGN OF REINFORCED CONCRETE CANTILEVER RETAINING WALLS , 2011 .

[15]  Shahram Pezeshk,et al.  Flexural Design of Reinforced Concrete Frames Using a Genetic Algorithm , 2003 .

[16]  Charles V. Camp,et al.  CO2 and cost optimization of reinforced concrete frames using a big bang-big crunch algorithm , 2013 .

[17]  J. V. Ramasamy,et al.  Optimum detailed design of reinforced concrete frames using genetic algorithms , 2007 .