Optimal Plastic Reliable Design of Reinforced Concrete Beams Considering Steel Bars Volume Probability

This paper aims to investigate the plastic response of reinforced concrete tapered beams when subjected to random steel reinforcement volumes, using both deterministic and probabilistic analyses, with the complementary strain energy as a boundary in the first case, and the reliability index as a boundary in the second. The first step in this study was to use a previously studied model and perform a deterministic analysis, assuming that the complementary strain energy is a limiting factor and controller of the plastic behaviour. Next, a probabilistic analysis is applied, with the reliability index as a limitation. At the same time, the volume of the reinforcement steel used, and the complementary strain energy were treated as probabilistic variables with mean values and specific standard deviations. This novel method highlighted the plastic behaviour limiting procedure and provided results that highlighted the nature of the model’s changed behaviour when the complementary strain energy was controlled and when applying probabilistic properties with reliability index limitation.