"Evaluating Performance of RC Beams Using Turn-of-the- Century Theories"

With the widespread use of reinforced concrete (RC) constructions in the latter decades of the 19th century in the main countries of Europe, a number of studies have been performed with a view to evaluating the stress conditions in the structures built with this new material in mathematical terms. This paper deals with part of a research program, one of the purposes of which was to identify any impressions emerging from preliminary studies and investigations and having to do with current theories on RC or, in other words, to verify whether there is any historical continuity between the hypotheses lying behind the early theoretical formulations and our understanding of today. The various calculation methods for bending in singly reinforced slabs and rectangular beams available from the scientific and technical literature around the turn of the century, presented in the companion paper, are here numerically compared, to investigate whether and to what degree these veri- fication and/or design methods are still reliable. The endpoint of the study was thus to provide an operator planning rehabilitation or restoration work with more efficient tools to facilitate a better philological interpretation of the structural behavior of historical RC structures.