Evaluation of Safety Index and Calibration of Load and Resistance Factors for Reinforced Concrete Beams under Bending, Shear and Torsion Demands

The aim of designing of the structural members is withstanding the members or structures against the different loading conditions such that the safety of the system could be preserved. The conventional method for designing of reinforced concrete members in Iranian concrete code is based on load and resistance factor. Although, load and resistance parameters are random variables, and in the mentioned Code the constant values have been designated for them during the designing procedure. Accounting these factors as the constants parameters will ultimately be led to the unsafe and uneconomical designs. The main purpose of this paper is probability-based designing of reinforcement concrete beams under simultaneous effects of bending, shear and torsion actions. For this purpose, analytical relations of the limit states for combination of bending, shear and torsion have been developed. Using the method, the structural designers could be fulfilled the designing of the RC beams based on the importance of structures and the required safety indexes of the owners. The next goal of this investigation is evaluation and calibration of load and resistance factors for desired safety index. The economic and fully probabilistic designing of concrete beams for simultaneous effects of bending, shear and torsion are available by implementing the proposed design procedures. In order to calculate the safety indexes a computer program has been written in the MATLAB environment, and the Monte Carlo simulation technique has been utilized.