Imminent crisis of climate change makes it imperative to strengthen efforts on adaptation and mitigation of destructive environmental impacts due to concrete production and application. Concrete component reuse in urban renewal will be an effective means to reduce concrete and steel production demands, whereas the conventional structural design encounters difficulties to ensure the reliability of reused components. In this work, we propose a novel paradigm for sustainability-based reliability design for the reuse of concrete components (abbreviated to sustainability-based reuse design paradigm), and a domain-specific machine learning approach is adopted to identify the reusability of concrete components and evaluate possible risks under the uncertain environment due to climate change, on the basis of the carbonation-induced degradation pattern and in-situ structure and climate data collected. The proposed paradigm has been implemented and validated in a case study of reused concrete structure design in Guangzhou area. Our results have shown that the proposed sustainability-based reuse design paradigm improves the design credibility, while the conventional design, which ignores climate change, underestimates failure probabilities grossly and overestimates the component's maximum service life by up to 22.5 years. By dispelling the reliability concerns on concrete component reuse, the sustainability-based reuse design paradigm will boost its promotion and unleash its substantial potential for carbon emission reduction.
Xia, B; Xiao, JZ; Li, SF
Sustainability-based reliability design for reuse of concrete components
Structural Safety