Sustainability of reinforced concrete frame structures – a case study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Traditionally, the engineering education is aiming to establish quantifiable, measurable units, and after that comparing those to utilise the unit considered more suitable.When thinking about sustainability of structures, traditional mentality has to be set aside, as comparing different structural systems is becoming a complex task.Choosing different materials for the same reinforced concrete structure has immediate comparable impact on the environment.Reinforced concrete structures are using excessively the limited limestone and other resources and, in the same time, a large quantity of energy for producing the rebar, the clinker and the structural concrete, having negative impact on the environment.Even if reinforced concrete structures are not generally known as the most sustainable solutions for several structural queries, reinforced concrete structural solutions are preferred for most of the situations due to the other advantages presented by these structures.Hence, considering that specific building indispensable for the society, the aim of obtaining sustainable buildings becomes equivalent to decrease their negative impact on the environment while still taking full advantage of their strength.This target can be achieved by judicious choose of the built-in materials.For a given multistorey reinforced concrete frame building, the scope is to establish the concrete and the reinforcing steel classes in such a way that the impact of these materials on the environment to be kept at the lowest possible level.This paper presents a study on an ordinary reinforced concrete frame structure designed using two different concrete classes (C16/20 and C30/37) and two different reinforcing bar classes (PC52 and S500), obtaining four different possibilities for the same solution.Different combinations of built-in materials are resulting different economic and environmental impacts.The environmental impact for the whole life cycle of the studied solutions, using different material qualities, is estimated using Athena Impact Estimator for Buildings, taking into consideration weighted life-cycle analysis indicators (total energy used, the quantity of solid emissions in air and water, the required natural resources consumed -especially the non-renewable ones -the impact owed to the depletion of the natural resources, human health and the impact on the ecosystems).Besides the environmental impact estimation, realisation cost is also evaluated for each structural solution, obtaining a relationship between the cost (as the major decision influencer) and the sustainability of the studied solutions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".