Serviceability and Stability of Unreinforced Mass Concrete Structures - EC 2 Compatible Design Concept Derived from Comprehensive FE-Studies on Real Structural Behaviour

Many existing mass concrete structures are unreinforced because of economic aspects. Based upon the fact that no national or international standards for the design of such structures are available, each of them has to be treated as individual case. This often leads to safety concerns or concerns of reliability. An efficient design of unreinforced mass concrete structures needs a realistic evaluation of any crack formation to be expected. This calls for a realistic quantification of the decisive stress-distribution. This contribution shows first results of a preliminary study to develop a new design concept for unreinforced mass concrete structures that is in accordance with the design philosophy of Eurocode 2 (Ö NORM B 1992-1-1, 2011). This contribution also deals with the development of a new, efficient time-step FEM-based approach for the consideration of viscoelasticity in order to allow a comprehensie parametric study on the restraint behaviour of mass concrete structures.