Optimization Approaches for Durable Reinforced Concrete Structures considering Interval and Stochastic Parameter Uncertainty

Abstract The durability of reinforced concrete structures is dominated by steel reinforcement corrosion and uncertain service loads, which have to be considered in the lifetime oriented structural design. The transport of corrosive substances into the structure is considerably influenced by load induced cracking. The crack width therefore is a major controlling factor for the lifetime of reinforced concrete structures. To improve the design for durability, finite element models in combination with optimization approaches for polymorphic uncertain data are presented. Here, the crack width at the reinforcement layer is used as the optimization objective to be minimized. The structural reliability is treated as a constraint of the optimization task in terms of the accepted failure probability. The concrete covers of the reinforcement layers are chosen as interval design parameters, with midpoints to be optimized and a given radius to take construction imprecision into account. The structural loading, the Young's modulus of concrete and the corresponding tensile strength are considered as stochastic a priori parameters within the optimization, which is solved by a particle swarm optimization approach in combination with an artificial neural network surrogate model. The polymorphic uncertain structural response is computed by a combination of Monte Carlo simulations and optimization‐based interval analysis to consider the stochastic and interval parameters within the optimization task, respectively. An application example demonstrates the performance of the proposed approach.