Analysis of textile-reinforced concrete structures under consideration of non-traditional uncertainty models

This article is a contribution towards the innovative development and practical application of structures reinforced by means of textile fabrics. Textile reinforcement embedded in fine-grained concrete not only finds application in new structures but may also be used for the additional strengthening of existing steel-reinforced concrete (RC) structures. The article focuses on a FE-model suitable for folded-plate structures. This so-called multi-reference-plane model (MRM) is capable of describing the structural behavior of RC structures strengthened by textile-reinforced concrete (TRC) layers, because those are characterized by a multi-Kirchhoff kinematics. New TRC structures may also be analyzed with the aid of the MRM as structures with one reference plane only. Experimental and numerical investigations demonstrate that structural responses of TRC structures are highly dependent on the spatial and temporal variation of the uncertain material and geometric data. For this reason the present paper concentrates on the generalized uncertainty modeling of material and geometric parameters with the aid of fuzzy and fuzzy random functions. The uncertainty models and the MRM are combined in the framework of the fuzzy stochastic finite element method (FSFEM). The introduced models are applied to three examples. (C) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.