Criterios para la evaluación de estructuras de hormigón armado

Criteria for strength evaluation of reinforced concrete structures

This paper is an overview of the state of art evaluation of existing reinforced concrete structures from the point of view of their practical use. The methods of structure evaluation are revised and the safety concepts both for a section and an element are considered. Questions like distribution in units for structure study, charecteristic resistance estimated for the compressive strength of concrete and the tensile strength of steel and the coefficients of reduction to be used in the recalculation are revised, thus some criteria are proposed for situations which are not covered by the normatives. The article presents some details, that are usually not considered in structural analysis but could become very useful for the strength evaluation of structures, and that reviews the acceptable values of the safety coefficients. So the safety coefficients derived from EHE-98 are deduced, and the resulting values are compared with the ones suggested by ACI-318. In conclusion a series of concepts of ruin in spanish normatives are presented.