Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design Part 1

Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design.

by Edward G.o.dfrey.

Not many years ago physicians had certain rules and practices by which they were guided as to when and where to bleed a patient in order to relieve or cure him. What of those rules and practices to-day? If they were logical, why have they been abandoned?

It is the purpose of this paper to show that reinforced concrete engineers have certain rules and practices which are no more logical than those governing the blood-letting of former days. If the writer fails in this, by reason of the more weighty arguments on the other side of the questions he propounds, he will at least have brought out good reasons which will stand the test of logic for the rules and practices which he proposes to condemn, and which, at the present time, are quite lacking in the voluminous literature on this comparatively new subject.

Destructive criticism has recently been decried in an editorial in an engineering journal. Some kinds of destructive criticism are of the highest benefit; when it succeeds in destroying error, it is reconstructive. No reform was ever accomplished without it, and no reformer ever existed who was not a destructive critic. If showing up errors and faults is destructive criticism, we cannot have too much of it; in fact, we cannot advance without it. If engineering practice is to be purged of its inconsistencies and absurdities, it will never be done by dwelling on its excellencies.

Reinforced concrete engineering has fairly leaped into prominence and apparently into full growth, but it still wears some of its swaddling-bands. Some of the garments which it borrowed from sister forms of construction in its short infancy still cling to it, and, while these were, perhaps, the best makes.h.i.+fts under the circ.u.mstances, they fit badly and should be discarded. It is some of these misfits and absurdities which the writer would like to bring prominently before the Engineering Profession.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 1.]

The first point to which attention is called, is ill.u.s.trated in Fig. 1.

It concerns sharp bends in reinforcing rods in concrete. Fig. 1 shows a reinforced concrete design, one held out, in nearly all books on the subject, as a model. The reinforcing rod is bent up at a sharp angle, and then may or may not be bent again and run parallel with the top of the beam. At the bend is a condition which resembles that of a hog-chain or truss-rod around a queen-post. The reinforcing rod is the hog-chain or the truss-rod. Where is the queen-post? Suppose this rod has a section of 1 sq. in. and an inclination of 60 with the horizontal, and that its unit stress is 16,000 lb. per sq. in. The forces, _a_ and _b_, are then 16,000 lb. The force, _c_, must be also 16000 lb. What is to take this force, _c_, of 16,000 lb.? There is nothing but concrete. At 500 lb. per sq. in., this force would require an area of 32 sq. in. Will some advocate of this type of design please state where this area can be found? It must, of necessity, be in contact with the rod, and, for structural reasons, because of the lack of stiffness in the rod, it would have to be close to the point of bend. If a.n.a.logy to the queen-post fails so completely, because of the almost complete absence of the post, why should not this borrowed garment be discarded?

If this same rod be given a gentle curve of a radius twenty or thirty times the diameter of the rod, the side unit pressure will be from one-twentieth to one-thirtieth of the unit stress on the steel. This being the case, and being a simple principle of mechanics which ought to be thoroughly understood, it is astounding that engineers should perpetrate the gross error of making a sharp bend in a reinforcing rod under stress.

The second point to which attention is called may also be ill.u.s.trated by Fig. 1. The rod marked 3 is also like the truss-rod of a queen-post truss in appearance, because it ends over the support and has the same shape. But the a.n.a.logy ends with appearance, for the function of a truss-rod in a queen-post truss is not performed by such a reinforcing rod in concrete, for other reasons than the absence of a post. The truss-rod receives its stress by a suitable connection at the end of the rod and over the support of the beam. The reinforcing rod, in this standard beam, ends abruptly at the very point where it is due to receive an important element of strength, an element which would add enormously to the strength and safety of many a beam, if it could be introduced.

Of course a reinforcing rod in a concrete beam receives its stress by increments imparted by the grip of the concrete; but these increments can only be imparted where the tendency of the concrete is to stretch.

This tendency is greatest near the bottom of the beam, and when the rod is bent up to the top of the beam, it is taken out of the region where the concrete has the greatest tendency to stretch. The function of this rod, as reinforcement of the bottom f.l.a.n.g.e of the beam, is interfered with by bending it up in this manner, as the beam is left without bottom-f.l.a.n.g.e reinforcement, as far as that rod is concerned, from the point of bend to the support.

It is true that there is a shear or a diagonal tension in the beam, and the diagonal portion of the rod is apparently in a position to take this tension. This is just such a force as the truss-rod in a queen-post truss must take. Is this reinforcing rod equipped to perform this office? The beam is apt to fail in the line, _A B_. In fact, it is apt to crack from shrinkage on this or almost any other line, and to leave the strength dependent on the reinforcing steel. Suppose such a crack should occur. The entire strength of the beam would be dependent on the grip of the short end of Rod 3 to the right of the line, _A B_. The grip of this short piece of rod is so small and precarious, considering the important duty it has to perform, that it is astounding that designers, having any care for the permanence of their structures, should consider for an instant such features of design, much less incorporate them in a building in which life and property depend on them.

The third point to which attention is called, is the feature of design just mentioned in connection with the bent-up rod. It concerns the anchorage of rods by the embedment of a few inches of their length in concrete. This most flagrant violation of common sense has its most conspicuous example in large engineering works, where of all places better judgment should prevail. Many retaining walls have been built, and described in engineering journals, in papers before engineering societies of the highest order, and in books enjoying the greatest reputation, which have, as an essential feature, a great number of rods which cannot possibly develop their strength, and might as well be of much smaller dimensions. These rods are the vertical and horizontal rods in the counterfort of the retaining wall shown at _a_, in Fig. 2. This retaining wall consists of a front curtain wall and a horizontal slab joined at intervals by ribs or counterforts. The manifest and only function of the rib or counterfort is to tie together the curtain wall and the horizontal slab. That it is or should be of concrete is because the steel rods which it contains, need protection. It is clear that failure of the retaining wall could occur by rupture through the Section _A B_, or through _B C_. It is also clear that, apart from the cracking of the concrete of the rib, the only thing which would produce this rupture is the pulling out of the short ends of these reinforcing rods.

Writers treat the triangle, _A B C_, as a beam, but there is absolutely no a.n.a.logy between this triangle and a beam. Designers seem to think that these rods take the place of so-called shear rods in a beam, and that the inclined rods are equivalent to the rods in a tension f.l.a.n.g.e of a beam. It is hard to understand by what process of reasoning such results can be attained. Any clear a.n.a.lysis leading to these conclusions would certainly be a valuable contribution to the literature on the subject. It is scarcely possible, however, that such a.n.a.lysis will be brought forward, for it is the apparent policy of the reinforced concrete a.n.a.lyst to jump into the middle of his proposition without the enc.u.mbrance of a premise.

There is positively no evading the fact that this wall could fail, as stated, by rupture along either _A B_ or _B C_. It can be stated just as positively that a set of rods running from the front wall to the horizontal slab, and anch.o.r.ed into each in such a manner as would be adopted were these slabs suspended on the rods, is the only rational and the only efficient design possible. This design is ill.u.s.trated at _b_ in Fig. 2.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 2.]

The fourth point concerns shear in steel rods embedded in concrete. For decades, specifications for steel bridges have gravely given a unit shear to be allowed on bridge pins, and every bridge engineer knows or ought to know that, if a bridge pin is properly proportioned for bending and bearing, there is no possibility of its being weak from shear. The centers of bearings cannot be brought close enough together to reduce the size of the pin to where its shear need be considered, because of the width required for bearing on the parts. Concrete is about one-thirtieth as strong as steel in bearing. There is, therefore, somewhat less than one-thirtieth of a reason for specifying any shear on steel rods embedded in concrete.

The gravity of the situation is not so much the serious manner in which this unit of shear in steel is written in specifications and building codes for reinforced concrete work (it does not mean anything in specifications for steelwork, because it is ignored), but it is apparent when designers soberly use these absurd units, and proportion shear rods accordingly.

Many designers actually proportion shear rods for shear, shear in the steel at units of 10,000 or 12,000 lb. per sq. in.; and the blame for this dangerous practice can be laid directly to the literature on reinforced concrete. Shear rods are given as standard features in the design of reinforced concrete beams. In the Joint Report of the Committee of the various engineering societies, a method for proportioning shear members is given. The stress, or shear per shear member, is the longitudinal shear which would occur in the s.p.a.ce from member to member. No hint is given as to whether these bars are in shear or tension; in fact, either would be absurd and impossible without greatly overstressing some other part. This is just a sample of the state of the literature on this important subject. Shear bars will be taken up more fully in subsequent paragraphs.

The fifth point concerns vertical stirrups in a beam. These stirrups are conspicuous features in the designs of reinforcing concrete beams.

Explanations of how they act are conspicuous in the literature on reinforced concrete by its total absence. By stirrups are meant the so-called shear rods strung along a reinforcing rod. They are usually U-shaped and looped around the rod.

It is a common practice to count these stirrups in the shear, taking the horizontal shear in a beam. In a plate girder, the rivets connecting the f.l.a.n.g.e to the web take the horizontal shear or the increment to the f.l.a.n.g.e stress. Compare two 3/4-in. rivets tightly driven into holes in a steel angle, with a loose vertical rod, 3/4 in. in diameter, looped around a reinforcing rod in a concrete beam, and a correct comparison of methods of design in steel and reinforced concrete, as they are commonly practiced, is obtained.

These stirrups can take but little hold on the reinforcing rods--and this must be through the medium of the concrete--and they can take but little shear. Some writers, however, hold the opinion that the stirrups are in tension and not in shear, and some are bold enough to compare them with the vertical tension members of a Howe truss. Imagine a Howe truss with the vertical tension members looped around the bottom chord and run up to the top chord without any connection, or hooked over the top chord; then compare such a truss with one in which the end of the rod is upset and receives a nut and large washer bearing solidly against the chord. This gives a comparison of methods of design in wood and reinforced concrete, as they are commonly practiced.

Anchorage or grip in the concrete is all that can be counted on, in any event, to take up the tension of these stirrups, but it requires an embedment of from 30 to 50 diameters of a rod to develop its full strength. Take 30 to 50 diameters from the floating end of these shear members, and, in some cases, nothing or less than nothing will be left.

In any case the point at which the shear member, or stirrup, is good for its full value, is far short of the centroid of compression of the beam, where it should be; in most cases it will be nearer the bottom of the beam. In a Howe truss, the vertical tension members having their end connections near the bottom chord, would be equivalent to these shear members.

The sixth point concerns the division of stress into shear members.

Briefly stated, the common method is to a.s.sume each shear member as taking the horizontal shear occurring in the s.p.a.ce from member to member. As already stated, this is absurd. If stirrups could take shear, this method would give the shear per stirrup, but even advocates of this method acknowledge that they can not. To apply the common a.n.a.logy of a truss: each shear member would represent a tension web member in the truss, and each would have to take all the shear occurring in a section through it.

If, for example, shear members were s.p.a.ced half the depth of a beam apart, each would take half the shear by the common method. If shear members take vertical shear, or if they take tension, what is between the two members to take the other half of the shear? There is nothing in the beam but concrete and the tension rod between the two shear members.

If the concrete can take the shear, why use steel members? It is not conceivable that an engineer should seriously consider a tension rod in a reinforced concrete beam as carrying the shear from stirrup to stirrup.

The logical deduction from the proposition that shear rods take tension is that the tension rods must take shear, and that they must take the full shear of the beam, and not only a part of it. For these shear rods are looped around or attached to the tension rods, and since tension in the shear rods would logically be imparted through the medium of this attachment, there is no escaping the conclusion that a large vertical force (the shear of the beam) must pa.s.s through the tension rod. If the shear member really relieves the concrete of the shear, it must take it all. If, as would be allowable, the shear rods take but a part of the shear, leaving the concrete to take the remainder, that carried by the rods should not be divided again, as is recommended by the common method.

Bulletin No. 29 of the University of Illinois Experiment Station shows by numerous experiments, and reiterates again and again, that shear rods do not act until the beam has cracked and partly failed. This being the case, a shear rod is an illogical element of design. Any element of a structure, which cannot act until failure has started, is not a proper element of design. In a steel structure a bent plate which would straighten out under a small stress and then resist final rupture, would be a menace to the rigidity and stability of the structure. This is exactly a.n.a.logous to shear rods which cannot act until failure has begun.

When the man who tears down by criticism fails to point out the way to build up, he is a destructive critic. If, under the circ.u.mstances, designing with shear rods had the virtue of being the best thing to do with the steel and concrete disposed in a beam, as far as experience and logic in their present state could decide, nothing would be gained by simply criticising this method of design. But logic and tests have shown a far simpler, more effective, and more economical means of disposing of the steel in a reinforced concrete beam.

In shallow beams there is little need of provision for taking shear by any other means than the concrete itself. The writer has seen a reinforced slab support a very heavy load by simple friction, for the slab was cracked close to the supports. In slabs, shear is seldom provided for in the steel reinforcement. It is only when beams begin to have a depth approximating one-tenth of the span that the shear in the concrete becomes excessive and provision is necessary in the steel reinforcement. Years ago, the writer recommended that, in such beams, some of the rods be curved up toward the ends of the span and anch.o.r.ed over the support. Such reinforcement completely relieves the concrete of all shearing stress, for the stress in the rod will have a vertical component equal to the shear. The concrete will rest in the rod as a saddle, and the rod will be like the cable of a suspension span. The concrete could be in separate blocks with vertical joints, and still the load would be carried safely.

By end anchorage is not meant an inch or two of embedment in concrete, for an iron vise would not hold a rod for its full value by such means.

Neither does it mean a hook on the end of the rod. A threaded end with a bearing washer, and a nut and a lock-nut to hold the washer in place, is about the only effective means, and it is simple and cheap. Nothing is as good for this purpose as plain round rods, for no other shape affords the same simple and effective means of end connection. In a line of beams, end to end, the rods may be extended into the next beam, and there act to take the top-f.l.a.n.g.e tension, while at the same time finding anchorage for the princ.i.p.al beam stress.

The simplicity of this design is shown still further by the absence of a large number of little pieces in a beam box, as these must be held in their proper places, and as they interfere with the pouring of the concrete.

It is surprising that this simple and unpatented method of design has not met with more favor and has scarcely been used, even in tests. Some time ago the writer was asked, by the head of an engineering department of a college, for some ideas for the students to work up for theses, and suggested that they test beams of this sort. He was met by the astounding and fatuous reply that such would not be reinforced concrete beams. They would certainly be concrete beams, and just as certainly be reinforced.

Bulletin 29 of the University of Illinois Experiment Station contains a record of tests of reinforced concrete beams of this sort. They failed by the crus.h.i.+ng of the concrete or by failure in the steel rods, and nearly all the cracks were in the middle third of the beams, whereas beams rich in shear rods cracked princ.i.p.ally in the end thirds, that is, in the neighborhood of the shear rods. The former failures are ideal, and are easier to provide against. A crack in a beam near the middle of the span is of little consequence, whereas one near the support is a menace to safety.

The seventh point of common practice to which attention is called, is the manner in which bending moments in so-called continuous beams are juggled to reduce them to what the designer would like to have them.

This has come to be almost a matter of taste, and is done with as much precision or reason as geologists guess at the age of a fossil in millions of years.

If a line of continuous beams be loaded uniformly, the maximum moments are negative and are over the supports. Who ever heard of a line of beams in which the reinforcement over the supports was double that at mid-spans? The end support of such a line of beams cannot be said to be fixed, but is simply supported, hence the end beam would have a negative bending moment over next to the last support equal to that of a simple span. Who ever heard of a beam being reinforced for this? The common practice is to make a reduction in the bending moment, at the middle of the span, to about that of a line of continuous beams, regardless of the fact that they may not be continuous or even contiguous, and in spite of the fact that the loading of only one gives quite different results, and may give results approaching those of a simple beam.

If the beams be designed as simple beams--taking the clear distance between supports as the span and not the centers of bearings or the centers of supports--and if a reasonable top reinforcement be used over these supports to prevent cracks, every requirement of good engineering is met. Under extreme conditions such construction might be heavily stressed in the steel over the supports. It might even be overstressed in this steel, but what could happen? Not failure, for the beams are capable of carrying their load individually, and even if the rods over the supports were severed--a thing impossible because they cannot stretch out sufficiently--the beams would stand.

Continuous beam calculations have no place whatever in designing stringers of a steel bridge, though the end connections will often take a very large moment, and, if calculated as continuous, will be found to be strained to a very much larger moment. Who ever heard of a failure because of continuous beam action in the stringers of a bridge? Why cannot reinforced concrete engineering be placed on the same sound footing as structural steel engineering?

The eighth point concerns the s.p.a.cing of rods in a reinforced concrete beam. It is common to see rods bunched in the bottom of such a beam with no regard whatever for the ability of the concrete to grip the steel, or to carry the horizontal shear incident to their stress, to the upper part of the beam. As an ill.u.s.tration of the logic and a.n.a.lysis applied in discussing the subject of reinforced concrete, one well-known authority, on the premise that the unit of adhesion to rod and of shear are equal, derives a rule for the s.p.a.cing of rods. His reasoning is so false, and his rule is so far from being correct, that two-thirds would have to be added to the width of beam in order to make it correct. An error of 66% may seem trifling to some minds, where reinforced concrete is considered, but errors of one-tenth this amount in steel design would be cause for serious concern. It is reasoning of the most elementary kind, which shows that if shear and adhesion are equal, the width of a reinforced concrete beam should be equal to the sum of the peripheries of all reinforcing rods gripped by the concrete. The width of the beam is the measure of the shearing area above the rods, taking the horizontal shear to the top of the beam, and the peripheries of the rods are the measure of the gripping or adhesion area.

a.n.a.lysis which examines a beam to determine whether or not there is sufficient concrete to grip the steel and to carry the shear, is about at the vanis.h.i.+ng point in nearly all books on the subject. Such misleading a.n.a.lysis as that just cited is worse than nothing.

The ninth point concerns the T-beam. Excessively elaborate formulas are worked out for the T-beam, and haphazard guesses are made as to how much of the floor slab may be considered in the compression f.l.a.n.g.e. If a fraction of this mental energy were directed toward a logical a.n.a.lysis of the shear and gripping value of the stem of the T-beam, it would be found that, when the stem is given its proper width, little, if any, of the floor slab will have to be counted in the compression f.l.a.n.g.e, for the width of concrete which will grip the rods properly will take the compression incident to their stress.

The tenth point concerns elaborate theories and formulas for beams and slabs. Formulas are commonly given with 25 or 30 constants and variables to be estimated and guessed at, and are based on a.s.sumptions which are inaccurate and untrue. One of these a.s.sumptions is that the concrete is initially unstressed. This is quite out of reason, for the shrinkage of the concrete on hardening puts stress in both concrete and steel. One of the coefficients of the formulas is that of the elasticity of the concrete. No more variable property of concrete is known than its coefficient of elasticity, which may vary from 1,000,000 to 5,000,000 or 6,000,000; it varies with the intensity of stress, with the kind of aggregate used, with the amount of water used in mixing, and with the atmospheric condition during setting. The unknown coefficient of elasticity of concrete and the non-existent condition of no initial stress, vitiate entirely formulas supported by these two props.

Here again destructive criticism would be vicious if these mathematical gymnasts were giving the best or only solution which present knowledge could produce, or if the critic did not point out a subst.i.tute. The subst.i.tute is so simple of application, in such agreement with experiments, and so logical in its derivation, that it is surprising that it has not been generally adopted. The neutral axis of reinforced concrete beams under safe loads is near the middle of the depth of the beams. If, in all cases, it be taken at the middle of the depth of the concrete beam, and if variation of intensity of stress in the concrete be taken as uniform from this neutral axis up, the formula for the resisting moment of a reinforced concrete beam becomes extremely simple and no more complex than that for a rectangular wooden beam.

The eleventh point concerns complex formulas for chimneys. It is a simple matter to find the tensile stress in that part of a plain concrete chimney between two radii on the windward side. If in this s.p.a.ce there is inserted a rod which is capable of taking that tension at a proper unit, the safety of the chimney is a.s.sured, as far as that tensile stress is concerned. Why should frightfully complex formulas be proposed, which bring in the unknowable modulus of elasticity of concrete and can only be solved by stages or dependence on the calculations of some one else?

The twelfth point concerns deflection calculations. As is well known, deflection does not play much of a part in the design of beams.

Sometimes, however, the pa.s.sing requirement of a certain floor construction is the amount of deflection under a given load. Professor Gaetano Lanza has given some data on recorded deflections of reinforced concrete beams.[B] He has also worked out the theoretical deflections on various a.s.sumptions. An attempt to reconcile the observed deflections with one of several methods of calculating stresses led him to the conclusion that:

"The observations made thus far are not sufficient to furnish the means for determining the actual distribution of the stresses, and hence for the deduction of reliable formulae for the computation of the direct stresses, shearing stresses, diagonal stresses, deflections, position of the neutral axis, etc., under a given load."

Professor Lanza might have gone further and said that the observations made thus far are sufficient to show the hopelessness of deriving a formula that will predict accurately the deflection of a reinforced concrete beam. The wide variation shown by two beam tests cited by him, in which the beams were identical, is, in itself, proof of this.