Serviceability of fabric-formed concrete structures

Fabric form-work is a newly developed technique to cast concrete structures with a great advantage of saving concrete material of up to 40%. This technique is particularly associated with optimized concrete structures that usually have smaller cross-section dimensions than equivalent prismatic members. However, this can make the structural system produced from these members prone to smaller serviceability safety margins. Therefore, it is very important to understand serviceability issue of non-prismatic concrete structures. In this paper, an analytical computer-based model to optimize concrete beams and to predict load-deflection behaviour of both prismatic and non-prismatic concrete beams is presented. The model was developed based on the method of sectional analysis and integration of curvatures. Results from the analytical model were compared to load-deflection behaviour of a number of beams with different geometric and material properties from other researchers. The results of the comparison show that, the analytical program can accurately predict load-deflection response of concrete beams with medium reinforcement ratios. However, it over-estimates deflection values for lightly reinforced specimens. Finally, the analytical program acceptably predicted load-deflection behaviour of on-prismatic concrete beams.