Foam concrete is a promising material in building and construction applications, providing such outstanding properties as high specific strength, excellent thermal insulation, and effective acoustic absorption in human-inhabited buildings. However, because the porosity and permeable water absorption properties of foam concrete are significantly higher, its durability is often not comparable to that of ordinary concrete, and so the durability of foam concrete requires significant attention during the life cycle of building applications. Durable materials can greatly reduce the environmental impact of waste from maintenance and replacement and the consumption of natural resources resulting from the production of repair and replacement materials. After hardening, the durability of foam concrete includes freeze-thaw cycle resistance, elevated temperature resistance, carbonation resistance, efflorescence resistance, sulfate resistance, chloride resistance, alkali-silica reaction, and so on. This paper reviews articles on the durability of ordinary Portland cement (OPC) foam concrete, geopolymer foam concrete (GFC), magnesium phosphate cement (MPC) foam concrete, sulphoaluminate cement (SAC) foam concrete, and limestone calcined clay cement (LC³) foam concrete and compares their durability to provide a reference for the life cycle design and service life estimation of foam concrete members.

A research study has been conducted on a newly proposed design of embedded steel plate composite coupling beams with shear studs in order to improve the performance of reinforced concrete (RC) coupling beams under severe wind or earthquake loading. The experimental results on three coupling beams tested under reversed cyclic loading are discussed in this paper. One of the coupling beams was conventionally reinforced, while each of the other two contained a vertically embedded steel plate along the whole span either with or without shear studs. It was found that embedded steel plates could improve the strength and the stiffness of coupling beams, while shear studs are required to enhance the plate/RC interaction in order to achieve good inelastic performance under large imposed shear deformations. Equations for calculating the required shear connection strength in the beam span to ensure the plate/RC composite action and for estimating the available plate/RC interface slips to mobilize shear studs have bee...

A building is a complex assemblage of both structural and non-structural components (NSC). Although many NSC, such as partition walls, external walls, parapet walls, stairwells, elevator shafts and so forth, are connected directly to the structural system, their behaviour and stiffening effects under lateral loading have normally been ignored by design engineers, despite significant advances in computer technology and the availability of modern computational resources. The performance of structures can be greatly improved by the increase in strength arising from the NSC; on the contrary, this increase in strength also accompanies an increase in the initial stiffness of the structure, which may consequently attract additional seismically induced lateral inertia forces. This paper is concerned with the estimation of the lateral stiffness contributed by the NSC to the total stiffness of three common forms of tall building structures constructed in Hong Kong. Both dynamic tests and numerical modelling of the buildings have been carried out for this purpose. Natural period estimates from dynamic tests and from analyses using calibrated finite element models were found to be in remarkable agreement. Significant stiffness contributions from NSC to the total lateral stiffness of tall buildings have been observed in the study. The extent of the contributions depends on the structural form and the type of components. Other contributions to the additional stiffness have also been analysed for comparison in the study. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Existing reinforced concrete (RC) beams can be effectively strengthened by attaching steel plates to the side faces of the beams using anchor bolts. The performance of this type of beam, bolted side-plated (BSP) beams, is mainly controlled by the degree of partial interaction at the steel-concrete interface. In this study, a total of seven moderately reinforced BSP beams with different steel plate depths and various bolt spacings were tested. Their behaviours were compared to the available test results for lightly reinforced BSP beams obtained by other researchers. The results show that moderately reinforced RC beams are more effective in increasing the flexural strength and ductility capacity using deeper steel plates than the use of a greater number of anchor bolts. It was also found that the longitudinal and transverse slips were controlled by both the stiffness ratios of the steel plates to the RC beam and the force-slip response of the anchor bolts.