COMPUTATIONAL-MODELING TECHNOLOGY FOR ASSESSING THE IMPACT OF PREDICTED DESTRUCTIVE PROCESSES IN CONCRETE ON THE BEARING CAPACITY OF BUILDING STRUCTURES

Abstract

The discovery in recent years in the United States of the destructive processes in concrete of hydraulic structures (dams) and reinforced concrete contaminants of reactor halls of NPPs has led to great interest and attention to relevant processes as phenomena / factors that can significantly impair operational safety of facilities, in particular to lead to non-compliance with the requirements of nuclear and radiation safety for the operation of nuclear installations under the event of technological emergencies as well as under seismic influences. This issue is also relevant for Ukraine, where there are 15 NPP units under operation, and also more two units during a long time are under construction.
It should be noted that currently known technologies for monitoring the technical state of building structures (BS) do not have tools for non-destructive testing of BS, which allow to reliably determine the belonging of the concrete of internal volume of BS to the degraded state and even more identify correctly the boundaries of degradation zones, the physical-chemical mechanism of occurrence and progression of degradation, the stage of development (evolution) of the process of the material destruction, etc.
Taking into account the above mentioned problem - the practical lack of tools and technologies to detect and assess the impact of internal massifs of damaged concrete on the overall serviceability of BS - the authors of article (in frames of the search study) have elaborated and approbated the calculative-model approach of determining of the degree of loss of serviceability (bearing capacity) of investigated structure for the case of the postulated conditions - the most probable and dangerous totality of geometric and physicochemical parameters inherent in structurally damaged concrete in the area of its localization in the BS. This approach - formalized as a computational-modeling technology / procedure - involves the implementation of a certain computational algorithm, the description and results of practical approbation of which are presented in the publication.