Advance Concrete – Reinforcing load bearing walls

Advance Concrete provides advanced reinforcement solutions, useful in designing reinforced concrete buildings so that the time spent for creation of the reinforcement drawings is considerably reduced.

Load bearing walls - main supporting elements in a structure

Nowadays, many private or office buildings are built using load bearing walls as main supporting elements. In a vertical plane, the load bearing walls have a large capacity of processing gravitational loads, which recommends them for buildings with several levels, in seismic areas. On the other hand, in a perpendicular direction on the wall plane, the load bearing walls provide small resistance to horizontal forces and usually are supported by perpendicular walls or similar structures.

Mainly, there are three categories of structures supported by load bearing walls:

• Load bearing wall structures
• Structures with central cores and perimeter columns
• Mixed structures with walls, beams and columns

As they are load bearing elements, there are specific reinforcement standards and rules to be met regarding the steel grade of the reinforcement elements and the placement. For example, the openings in the load bearing walls usually reduce the resistance; therefore, additional reinforcement is necessary (e.g., reinforcement cages for lintels).

Easily create reinforcement solutions for load bearing walls

Advance Concrete Dynamic Reinforcement allows the user to create new reinforcement solutions for load bearing walls.

The simplest type of load bearing wall is a corbel. The load bearing wall is subjected to a vertical load (N), and a horizontal force (V) determined by the wind or sloped elements.

Fast creation of all reinforcement elements

Advance Concrete provides tools for creating all reinforcement elements necessary for load bearing wall reinforcement:

• Field reinforcement of the load bearing wall - two meshes consisting of independent horizontal and vertical bars, placed in such a way to insure the strength to shear force with respect to the bending moments perpendicular on the load bearing wall plane.
  
  
• Vertical reinforcement in load bearing wall corners - these bars are subjected to an important extension/compression force and create a moment able to balance the applied moment.
  
  
• Vertical reinforcement in wall intersections
  
  
• Reinforcement cages for the opening lintels
  
  
• Trimmer bars
  

In a structure, the walls may have various mechanical behaviors. The elements that affect their behavior are:

• Load bearing wall length height ratio (h / l)
• Intensity (strength) of the vertical load
• Bar placement (distribution) and reinforcement area

Extremities	A0	P0 = A0 / B
Vertical field	A	P = A / e*s
Horizontal field	At	Pt = At / e*t

Automatic creation of a drawing

The reinforcement drawing of a load bearing wall must integrate information regarding the reinforcement area, bar distribution according to local standards regarding concrete covers, laps and anchor lengths.

The drawing and contained information can be saved in a dynamic reinforcement solution which can be applied to other structural elements, with different dimensions, after modifying the key parameters. The reinforcement adapts automatically to the formwork shape and size, and the reinforcement drawing can be created, with all bars, meshes and the necessary annotations.

Starting from a set of Advance Concrete structural elements - load bearing walls in this case - the user automatically creates a drawing with the necessary predefined views: cuts, elevations, isometric views, top/bottom views. According to the elements geometry, sketch points are created.

Adding reinforcement elements

Next, the reinforcement elements are added, using Advance Concrete tools: straight bars, pin bars and stirrups, U, L and polygonal bars.

To create the reinforcement solution from the 2D details, several steps are required to insure that the distribution points of the bars and bar distributions match the sketch points. If new sketch points are necessary, they can be added starting from the default sketch points using simple mathematic operations (translation, rotations, intersections). For example, placing rectangular frames requires additional points at a given distance from the top-right and top-left points.

Defining formulas when saving the solution

In the last step, the user can define formulas to automatically determine bar distances and parameters (e.g., anchor length, hook length, concrete cover, etc.) according to the parameters entered when applying a solution. The following values can be determined:

Concrete cover for the horizontal bars:

• 1.5 cm for inside buildings with low air humidity;
• 3.5 cm for outer walls;

Horizontal bar diameter

According to the reinforcement area, minimum ¼ of the vertical bar diameter

Where:

The distance between the stirrups and wall corners

Where

Lapping length of the trimmer bars

Using the standard values for anchorage and lapping lengths, according to the concrete type:

	Length (number of diameters)
	fck / fcu = 25/30	fck / fcu = 28/30	fck / fcu = 30/37
Anchor length	40	37	36
Lap length	61	56	54

When the engineers publish their modification to the database, the draftsmen can see in their workspace the details that require update, and then they adjust the reinforcement according to the new sections.

Trimmer bar diameter



Where:

Also, certain geometric conditions can be defined:

• The minimum size of the openings


• Vertical bar laps from the field, above slabs

The reinforcement solutions are saved in a file for later use in other projects. Common tasks frequently encountered during the project development are simplified and reduced to simple parameter value input. The expertise of a designer or a draftsman can be "saved" in a dynamic reinforcement solution and shared between all members of the entire team and used in future projects.

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