Reliability Based Optimum Design of Reinforced Concrete Flat Slab

Abstract

In this study an analytical model was used to carry out reliability based optimum design of reinforced concrete flat slab using the sine cosine algorithm (SCA). An Interior flat slab panel was considered, in which the reliability and optimization formulation were derived based on Eurocode 2 (2004) using the prevalent at the time of the study. Design constraints were used to produce an optimal and reliable design, such as constraints associated with the reliability, upper and lower limits of slab depth and area of steel reinforcement. Slab depth and area of steel reinforcement are minimized to produce the optimal cost of the reinforced concrete flat slab while maintaining not less than acceptable level of reliability as specified by the Eurocode 0 (2002). Overall cost factor was developed to generalize and simplify the calculations of slab material cost of concrete and reinforcing steel of all sections and compared with the initial design. A reduction in design cost of the Reinforced concrete flat slab of about 9.03 % was achieved and The results clearly indicate that the optimum design parameters of the reinforced concrete flat slab can safely withstand the maximum imposed load of 5 ????????/m2 as recommended by EC 2 for high reliability class structures such as public. Numerical examples were presented to illustrate the model capability of calculating the reliability based optimum design cost of the reinforced concrete flat slab.