Architectural Institute of Japan published “Recommendations for Environmentally Conscious Practice of Reinforced Concrete Buildings” in September 2008, with the aim of demonstrating how concrete and reinforced concrete works should be toward environmental consious society. This report shows the outline of the publication.
This paper describes the prospects of control on shrinkage cracking of concrete based on the durability design. The influence of shrinkage cracking on concrete durability and the influencing factors on crazing are reviewed from the previous studies. The use of shrinkage reducing agent and the conduction of restricted shrinkage cracking test are proposed as the promising methods to control shrinkage cracking and to evaluate the potential of resistance to cracking, respectively.
The need to replace conventional methods with performance-based design is well recognized. As performance-based design has come into use around the world, reliability theory will be applied to the seismic safety and durability evaluation of concrete structures. The JSCE task committee 336 on reliability-based design of concrete structures was established in 2006. The objectives of the committee are to investigate the techniques for introducing reliability-based design into design codes for concrete structures in Japan and, to present the examples of practical seismic safety and the durability evaluation for concrete structures based on the reliability theory.