The two days course (April 9th and April 16th) aims to provide to the students an advanced knowledge on the evaluation of the load capacity of the so-called “D-Regions”, which are regions where the classical beam theory is not fulfilled due to geometrical discontinuities (for instance half-joint, corbel, etc.) or presence of concentrated loads.
In these cases, a different approach – such as a plasticity model based – that combines simplicity and precision is necessary. Even though these methods originate from equilibrium considerations and plastic admissibility only, they provide a solution on the safety side accurate enough, according to the static theorem of plasticity. Among these methods, the most common and reliable is the “strut-and-tie” (STM); the method, born from the intuition of Ritter and Morsch, fell in disuse until the modern structural theory by Schlaich gave it a complete formulation.
After the first part of theoretical notions, the lesson will focus on one hand on practical applications of the methods in actual case studies, showing their potentiality, and on the other on the research development on degraded elements, comparing the results with more refined methods such as those finite element based.