Design of high-strength concrete members

High-Strength Concrete has revolutionised the construction industry in the 1980’s and Australian researchers, consultants and contractors have been very active in this area. However, most major codes for design and construction with concrete are applicable only to normal strength concrete(f’< 50MPa) and are based on research on normal strength concrete (NSC). Even the Australian Code for Concrete Structures, AS3600-1994, does not contain provisions for HSC, mainly due to paucity of research data, in particular with Australian materials. The research at The University of Melbourne and elsewhere has shown that simply extrapolating the constitutive equations for NSC structures to HSC structures could either be unsafe or uneconomical. This paper discusses design rules suggested by the HSC research group at the University of Melbourne to update AS3600 to cover design areas for HSC, such as ductility of beams and columns, rectangular stress block for HSC, shear design for HSC and bond and anchorage of reinforcement in HSC members.