Stress Reduction: A Method of Rehabilitation of Concrete Building

So far we were on different methods of rehabilitation and repair of concrete structure or its specific members to make it serviceable for further use and upgrading its capacity for higher occupancy classifications. We have published different methods of repair and concrete repair materials as well. We will publish more methods of repair and advance repair materials to upgrade a structure with repair.

Now here, in this post we will discuss a method of rehabilitation, that doesn’t need repair work or further construction of new structural elements. This method requires some forms of dismantling just to make it serviceable by reducing stresses in the structure itself.

This method provide a relief to structure that are distressed or evaluated as hazardous for upcoming any disaster like earthquake or tornadoes or unexpected loading from any other sources. This is achieved by doing following stress reduction work:

a. Reducing some dead loads and live loads by changing occupancy classes.

b. Sometimes lightweight partitions are chosen to replace heavy weight partition of solid forms. Now-a-days many lightweight materials for partition wall are developed and used in practical cases to achieve this purpose for both new and older structures, rehabilitates in such manner.

c. Providing open spaces in floor by removing inside filler walls. This can be done only when occupancy class is changed.

d. A method of reduction can be imagined easily is reduction of stories. This provides a great amount reduction in stress and provides a safer column and shear wall if there have any.

e. A lower loading classification can be considered like avoiding some storage facilities, removing or reducing facilities of library, avoiding assembly places in the structure to reduce live loads.

f. Span of beams of structure can be reduced by applying struts etc.

Providing joints of shear movement in location of zero moment in continuous spans of structure is also a good method.